Don't Torture a Duckling

Year of Release:  1972

Director:  Lucio Fulci

Screenplay:  Lucio Fulci, Roberto Gianviti and Gianfranco Clerici, from a story by Lucio Fulci and Roberto Gianviti

Starring:  Florinda Bolkan, Barbara Bouchet, Tomas Milian, Irene Papas, Marc Porel

Running Time:  105 minutes

Genre:  Thriller, horror

The sleepy, rural Southern Italian town of Accendura is shattered by a series of murders of young boys.  As the police scramble to find a suspect, the superstitious locals, already suspicious of outsiders, prepare to take the law into their own hands.  Astute journalist Andrea Martelli (Milian) and wealthy party girl Patrizia (Bouchet) attempt to solve the crime before anyone else has to die.

Prolific Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci worked in a. number of genres before finding his niche with numerous gruesome horror and thriller films (must famously such delightful charmers as Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), City of the Living Dead (1980), The Beyond (1981), The House by the Cemetery (1981) and The New York Ripper (1982)).  Although the bloodletting here is fairly restrained by Fulci standards, this is one of the first films to use the violence which he would later become famous for.  This belongs firmly in the giallo subgenre.  The word "giallo" is literally the Italian for "yellow" and it was used as a name for a series of crime novels and thrillers published in Italy with distinctive yellow covers.  The term later became known for lurid horror and thriller films, that were notable for their elaborately choreographed murder scenes, usually high production values and buckets of gore.  Don't Torture a Duckling however is unusual for a giallo in having a distinctly Italian rural setting, most giallo films were set in urban settings, and frequently in London or America, to make them more saleable abroad.   As with many films of the genre, Don't Torture a Duckling has a memorable, lurid title which bears little to no connection with the plot of the film (the closest thing to a duckling in the film is a Donald Duck doll). The film is suspenseful, and the mystery is intriguing.  The Italian countryside looks beautiful and the cast are decent.  It does paint a very bleak picture of Italian small town life, as well as providing quite a scathing critique of the Catholic Church, and the police (who are portrayed as pretty much completely incompetent), as well as the causal cruelty of children (in the opening of the film a child shoots at a lizard with a catapult).  There is even a weird but effectively creepy Black Magic element.  To be fair, it paints a pretty bleak picture of human nature in general.  Some of the gore effects are unconvincing, and the theme of child murder, while not graphic, and a scene of gratuitous nudity may be offensive to some.  While it is not one of Fulci's best known films it is one of his better films.  

Barbara Bouchet and Tomas Milian in Don't Torture a Duckling