32 Days of Halloween V, Day 26: Don’t Torture a Duckling!

Today is the day we focus on Italian horror, or giallo. And let me tell you a little bit about my selection process. If I can’t call up something out of my head (increasingly hard to do, it’s a scary place up there…like a Rolodex but with booby traps like something out of Indiana Jones) then I’ll flip over to Wikipedia (which is always right) and let it inspire me. And then when browsing through Italian horror films I see a title like Don’t Torture a Duckling and get completely derailed.

There, that’s my process in a nutshell.

Your first reaction is probably the same as mine. This can’t be a real title. Especially not for a horror movie. But yes, it appears to be real, directed by the Italian horror meister Lucio Fulci. And yes, the title isn’t some weird translation thing: running Non si sevizia un paperino (the original Italian title) through Google Translate gives us the English title we have before us. So…right.

If we look to the trailer for explanations, there’s very little there. Something to do with murder, and voodoo dolls, and a naked chick (which is why the trailer is NSFW for boobage-plus, headsup). And the one duck we see in the trailer is a headless Donald Duck doll. And what I can tell you after having looked into it myself is that it has to do with children in a village winding up dead, and the search for the killer. For more on it, and to prove I haven’t just made this up, check out Wikipedia. Otherwise, here’s the freaky non-subtitled trailer. Enjoy!
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It’s out on DVD from Blue Underground.

Last year we took some time out to hang with Aaron Poole and his madmen as they divulged the Hollywood method for adapting the classics in “Make the Bad Men Stop.” Before that, it was a trio of Italian horror trailers, then a duo of Mario Bava trailers. And when we first started, we were checking out Evil Dead: The Musical.