Everyone may be a voyeur, but not everyone is a sadistic killer. Sex is like a wheel of fetishes, quirks, roleplaying and experimentation. You may know which one defines you, or if you’re adventurous, flick the arrow to see where it lands like a game of Twister awaiting you to try a position. Sadistic intentions are the elements reflecting onto the eyes of Mrs. Wardh like the sun going through a crystal. It reveals the truth, but it is up to her to accept the part of her past that stains the present.
The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971) may sound like an ordinary story about a married woman and her pill addiction akin to a Valley of the Dolls spinoff. It is not. The Italian film turns 50 this month and stars recurring Giallo actress Edwige Fenech (Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key), Spaghetti Western and Giallo actor George Hilton (Any Gun Can Play), and horror and exploitation film actor Ivan Rassimov (The Humanoid). Fenech plays Julie Wardh, whose persona slowly peels away to reveal itself like a mysterious gift as the movie progresses. Mrs. Wardh is the wife of a diplomat, and through various memories we see her as the victim of her former boyfriend Jean, who fulfills his sexual desires with violence and blood.
Julie is unable to forget her toxic relationship with Jean, even after her marriage to Neil Wardh. Jean stalks her and sends rose bouquets with threatening notes, “Worst part of you is the best thing you’ve got and it will always be mine – Jean.” When Jean flashes a menacing grin across the room at a party, Julie dashes into the dimly-lit streets until he yanks her toward him, “Nothing unites people like a vice in common,” he threatens. A poorly lit flashback creeps like fog as Jean stands over Wardh like a God as the light focuses on her gardenia-soft skin and midnight hair. She looks angelic and unaware of Jean’s presence until he shatters a glass bottle; its sharp edge tears his sleeping victim’s nightgown and through her chest to reveal blood. Like a vampire, his mouth rages in the crimson, both of them participate in kissing intensely as the shattered glass crunches. The memory ends with a paranoid Julie.
The viewer is captured by the mystery, mayhem and murder, eager to find out if the title of the film and Jean’s taunting love notes reveal something Mrs. Wardh has tried to hide beneath her tender and harmless persona. What if she has the same sadistic qualities as Jean and the murderer? The killer has a blood fetish that invigorates his sexual pleasure and serves as an incendiary to his desires to torture and even murder, thus his victims are always of the opposite sex. The film is like a psychedelic trip of nymphomania and sadomasochistic deprivations affecting the person who has them as well as those around them, resulting in deadly consequences. Sex as oppression and a deadly act.
Eroticism and mania are two words that might seem like oil and water, but instead, they are like flesh and blood. They exist and it only takes a few scratches on the surface to uncover them. The sadistic killers experience erotica, mania, and murder. They seek orgasms by inflicting pain and suffering onto others. Psychologists claim sadistic killers’ desire to be God-like ultimately as a desire to be in control of others. These killers validate their worth and bolster their egos as they watch their victims squirm in fear, pain and plead for help. Sadistic serial killers extend beyond cinema screens; Richard Ramirez, Ted Bundy, and Rodney Alcala for example. Masochistic men who are narcissistic, eager for sex, torture and murder. While watching The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh one can’t help but see reflections of Ramirez in Jean’s actions and his resemblance to the Night Stalker.
The trio of men involved with Mrs. Wardh: her husband, her ex-boyfriend Jean, and her lover George Corro, transforms the movie into a game of Guess Who. Any of these men could easily be the murderer with the razor blade, tormenting women at night. One by one, they are cleared of suspicion, at least temporarily. When Mrs. Wardh receives a phone call from an unknown man who threatens to tell her husband about her late-night fling with George, the caller orders her to meet at a park with bribe money in exchange for his silence. Her friend Carol goes instead, and she becomes another victim of the razor blade killer. Carol was a mutual friend of Jean and Julie and the commissioner interrogates both, as Julie points out all the coincidences between Jean and the unknown killer. “Who’s to say the killer is not a woman,” Jean interrupts. It is during this interrogation that Jean reveals Julie Wardh’s sexual blood fetish to the commissioner.
Sergio Martino directed The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, making it his first Giallo feature, and Ernesto Gastaldi (All The Colors Of The Dark) wrote it for the screen. Previous Giallo films experimented with similar bloody-eroticism themes, including The Murder Clinic (1966), about a razor-wielding killer at a mental hospital and a son whose psychotic urges cause him to kill girls at a boarding school, taking their body parts to create his ideal woman in The House That Screamed (1969). Sexploitation films are like the rust that covers shiny things, impossible to erase and once the damage is done, it keeps progressing.
Originally released in the US as Blade of the Ripper, Martino’s film offers night scenes inundated with Julie’s anxieties, her stalker ex-boyfriend, the mysterious killer seen only from the back and the bloody deaths of women in Vienna. The scenes from Mrs. Wardh’s past are the most vivaciously lit, clear but either faded into the dark or blurred with memories and hallucinations. Martino knows the exact moments to zoom the camera on Fenech’s expressive maroon eyes, the gloved hand with the weapon, and when to commit to a full shot of the crimes without revealing any facial details of the killer.
Suspenseful situations and ominous music keep the viewer intrigued after Jean is dead and Julie has bloody encounters that cause her to faint. The razor blade killer is still roaming the night and targeting Julie. The film blurs the line of horror thrillers like The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and Strangers on a Train (1951). Among the initial slasher films of the 1970s, such as Halloween (1978) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Vice of Mrs. Wardh focuses on murder through the psychological aspects of obsession, sex fetishes, and torture. Last year Severin Films released the film on a 2-disc Blu-ray featuring interviews with Martino, Gastaldi, Fenech, and a CD soundtrack.
Audiences are voyeurs, eager to watch the latest slasher film or psychological thriller dripping with horror, mystery, sex and gore. You are a voyeur, seeking entertainment in watching exploitative horror films. Go ahead and watch a movie you haven’t seen yet. Spin the wheel, or better yet, start with The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh.
