The Skin Beneath the Claws (1975)

A lot of the films I watch these days are in formats that are less than optimal: many appear to be VHS transfers at several generations removed from the original or even transfers of VHS on air recordings of TV showings of said films.  The latter often either include ad breaks or have had them crudely edited out, resulting in additional jumpiness.  They may also be 'TV edits', where material has been excised either for reasons of censorship or simply to fit a time slot.  Now, while such recordings are nostalgic for me to watch - they recreate the fuzzy, poorly recorded pirated dupes I often watched as a teenager - they are problematic in that they make it difficult to judge the true quality of the film being watched.  A case in point in The Skin Under the Claws (1975), which I recently watched on one of those dodgy Roku channels I frequent.  An obscure giallo/horror crossover that, as far as I'm aware, has never been released officially on any form of home video, VHS, DVD or Blu-Ray, the only version currently available is the very poor quality VHS transfer I was able to watch.  Judging by the poor tracking, sound quality and definition, it appears to be an on air recording from a TV screening, a suspicion reinforced by the short, seventy five minute, running time and jumpy editing.  Judging by the fact that copious amounts of nudity and quite a bit of gore is still in evidence, I'd guess that it was edited to fit a ninety minute (including ads) slot - so anything up to fifteen minutes of footage could be absent.  I'd also hazard a guess that it was taken from an outing on Italian TV - the dialogue is in Italian, (again, as far as I know, there was no English language release - the title used for the video's showing is simply a direct translation of the Italian on screen title), with fan-sourced English sub-titles.

I have to say that these sub-titles are probably one of the best things about this version of the film - going by my extremely rudimentary knowledge of Italian, they seem to be direct translations of the dialogue, with none of the usual editing, abbreviations or Anglicisation found in official sub-titles.  Which means we get the original dialogue in all its glorious absurdity and awkwardness.  Overall, though, the poor quality of the rest of the video makes the original film very hard to judge.  On the basis of what is available, it seems to be bat-shit crazy with an extremely confusing plot and action that constantly jumps all over the place, making the plot development seem completely illogical.  It is also extremely poorly paced, the first part of the film quickly getting bogged down by a romantic sub-plot which takes over the film, leaving everything to be seemingly resolved in a flurry of action in the last fifteen minutes - except that so many loose ends are left dangling and so much remains unexplained that the viewer is left scratching their head as to what they've just seen.  What the film seems to be about is a series of murders of young women in Rome in which traces of decomposing skin is found under the nails of the victims - are they being raped and murdered by the perambulating living corpse of a sex offender?  Well, the answer seems to lie at a clinic run by a German doctor obsessed with death and the process of dying, who believes that he can reverse the process of death, keeping corpses alive.  But that would be too obvious for any self-respecting giallo, so red-herrings galore are thrown into the plot - is it the apparently mad doctor's younger colleague who is really the murderer (is he, in fat, a living corpse resuscitated by the German dude)?   Is it that artist friend of the other younger colleague (the one that the male younger doctor is bonking) who has nude models hanging around his flat and paints erotic subjects the culprit, (there seems to be no other reason for him to be in the film).

A spanner is thrown in the works when the German doctor is found dead of a heart attack, (but only after confiding to the younger doctor that he had carried out experiments on baboons, achieving successful head transplants).  Then the second victim turns up in a suitcase left at a railway station, chopped into pieces - with the taxi driver who deposited the cases there claiming he picked their owner up outside the young doctor's flat!  On top of that, the German doc's body has now vanished from the morgue!  All of which sounds as if the film is incredibly eventful, except that there occurrences seem like mere background activities, as the film is dominated by the two younger doctors' love affair and a plodding police investigation by a chain-smoking police Commissioner.  Just to confuse things even more, I'd swear that on the version I saw, some of the scenes appeared to be out of sequence. At a guess, I'd say that whoever had edited out the TV ad breaks had reassembled the video in the wrong order.  Although, to be fair, I'm not sure that it would have made much more sense if shown in the right order.  It all hurries to a conclusion when the female doctor vanishes, another corpse turns up in the boot of a dumped car, which, the coroner concludes, had been kept artificially alive for months.  The car is finally traced to a mansion in the country which, of course, belongs to the supposedly dead doctor.  Equally inevitably, he is holding the female doctor captive there because, in another completely out of left field development, she is the double of his dead wife and he means to brainwash her into becoming his wife.

It all ends with a series of seemingly arbitrarily put together sequences: the mad doctor is suddenly running around the countryside in a mask, wide brimmed hat and cloak, randomly sexually assaulting young girls, then getting chased by their scythe-weilding father.  Then we're back at the mansion, where he has the female doctor tied up in the basement, then they're watching his 'greatest hits' torture videos, then suddenly she's loose again, being chased around the house by him, then they're outside and he's about to kill her, when the cops turn up and shoot him.  There's a final twist in the story, which I won't spoil, but it still doesn't explain anything.  I think that we're meant to assume that the mad doctor was dead all along, but had kept himself going artificially, with his apparent death part way through the film part of his plan to vanish and star again, while trying to divert blame for the murders onto the other doctor.  Why was he murdering women?  Well, it is implied that he was a Nazi scientist during the war, so it obviously follows that he must have been a twisted sex psycho.  The business about head transplants?  Another red herring, (unless we are meant to assume that he somehow managed to transplant his own head onto another body).  

I'm assuming that all this would have been explained by the apparently missing footage, (perhaps he does transplant his own head in this footage).  I'd also like to say that it would be better film seen in its complete form, with vibrant colour, smooth editing, decent sound quality and better pacing, not to mention a more logical plot.  But I'm not really sure.  The fact is that, even through the fuzzy, dark picture of the truncated video version you can see that it obviously had a restricted budget - there are no studio sets, with everything being shot in sparsely furnished apartments and spartan offices.  There is no medical equipment in evidence at the 'clinic', for instance, the only interiors we ever see seem to be half empty offices.  Moreover, even with the missing ten to fifteen minutes of footage restored, I doubt that the film would be any better paced, with the dull romance and uninspired police investigation still dominating proceedings.  At best, it might make the film's conclusion less confusing and far more definitive.  As it stands, the version of The Skin Beneath the Claws which is currently available is an intriguing but frustrating mess probably not at all representative of the makers' original intent, and it is tempting to think that, in its complete form, it might be some sort of lost classic.  But, in truth, the direction feels rather flat and uninspired, (it is perhaps notable that director/writer Alessandro Santini only directed three other films, none of them giallos or horror), and the script confusing and under developed, with clunky dialogue.  Still, it does have a pretty mellow jazz-orientated musical score typical of its era.  Anyway, if you are at all interested in judging the film for yourself, it's currently on YouTube, (I'm assuming this is he same edit that I saw).