Don’t Torture a Duckling
4K UHD (Limited Edition)
directed by Lucio Fulci
starring Barbara Bouchet, Tomas Milian
Don’t Torture a Duckling — a strange title and an even stranger movie from the “Italian Godfather of Gore,” Lucio Fulci. This giallo was shot years before Fulci would remake his career into a legend of horror starting with his sublime splatter masterpiece, Zombie (1979). Although there is a fair amount of grisly violence, it is not the stomach-churning viscera of his later work, yet the story he tells in Don’t Torture a Ducking is in some ways more disturbing and subversive than his brain-munching zombies.
A pair of reporters, Andrea (Tomas Milan) and Patrizia (Barbara Bouchet) descend on a small village in the Italian countryside to investigate. The modern highway runs right past the village, but modernity has passed it by and the townspeople, gripped by the horror that there is a child murderer amongst them, lash out with cruel vigilante justice on the eccentrics on the fringes of society. In the film’s most harrowing scene, a woman who practices a form of witchcraft is savagely beaten to death with chains in a cemetery. Again, it isn’t a gory spectacle, but is still a brutal and horrific scene. The ultimate gut punch in the film comes at the climax, when the killer is unmasked, pulling the rug out from under the very foundation of the lives of the villagers.
Lucio Fulci does a fantastic job of creating a real sense of place in the film. He conjures a surprising amount of sympathy for the locals’ plight. They view the outside world with a wary eye, as they feel sin is brought to them — a view which is reinforced by a group of prostitutes who drive out from the city to make a few bucks turning tricks for the local laborers (while local kids watch through slates in a shed) and even more disturbingly, by Patrizia, who likes to lounge in the nude and play seduction games with the pre-teen son of the maid in father’s summer house. Fulci also wields a very non-subtle hammer against the Catholic church, which in Italy in 1972 jangled nerves both within the establishment and with the counterculture youth. The early 1970s was a turbulent era in Italy, and everything, including mystery movies, had political points to make.
Don’t Torture a Duckling is not an obscure film, but it has only been in the past 20-25 years that giallo films have been getting their proper due in the US. Before that time, they were often miscategorized as horror films, often causing their reputations to suffer, as there was little context for the pervasive weirdness of the genre. Know that is not longer an issue, and Don’t Torture a Duckling has moved up the ranks to a lush 4K UHD release from Arrow Video. In addition to a great 4K restoration of the original camera negative, this disc also features a video essay, Hell is Already in Us by critic Kat Ellinger, and an audio commentary from Troy Howarth, who in addition to being one of the foremost experts on all things Fulci, is also a terrific listen.
