Calling All Police Cars (1975) & Footprints on the Moon (1975)

Calling All Police Cars - 8/10
Mario Caiano, who directed Nightmare Castle with Barbara Steele, shows himself to be a very competent director with Calling All Police Cars. It's not an amazing film. It's just very skilled. It is never heavy-handed with the exposition, shows you all you need to know, gives you intelligent characters who have depth and conflicts of interest, and the dialogue occurs only when needed, never falling into dull Americanisms (you know, like cops who say all these witty things at crime scenes). Calling is actually just a police procedural investigating a missing and eventually found-murdered girl for the first 72 minutes, then it becomes a giallo of sorts. This transition is smoothly handled--no Rat Pfink a Boo Boo here. There is a generally mature mindset at work that presents quite a lot of full-frontal nudity of teenage women without seeming gratuitous. Overall, a surprisingly good film.

Footprints on the Moon - 6/10
Florinda Bolkan stars in Last Year in Marienbad. No, wait, Last Tuesday in Garma. Basically a woman thinks she was in a place but she doesn't remember being in a place and she thinks other people remember her being in that place but they don't think so then they remember but she thinks they don't remember then she thinks she remembers but some guy tells her she doesn't remember and then someone dies. Oh yeah, and she has recurring nightmares of Klaus Kinski performing experiments on astronauts and leaving them to die on the moon, which she thinks are scenes from a movie called Footprints on the Moon (isn't that this movie?).

It's not a terrible movie. It is definitely intriguing to see Florinda attempting to solve this mystery of why she forgets three days of her life and her relationship to this town and the people in it. But its ambitions--or pretensions--strike me as not having been realized and the answer to the whole film is both mundane and left unexplained.

I watched this movie with high hopes based largely on the comments section right here on imdb. It is called a giallo--one of the most innovative gialli, no less. Well, it's no giallo. It isn't even a thriller. It is a psychodrama mystery film and nothing more--no horror here. Comparisons to David Lynch are unjustified. This is not the intellectual headgame they will have you believe. It is just a mystery film. It's pretty enjoyable while it's going on, mainly because Balkan can carry the film and manage protagonists like this (Flavia-types).

One huge bonus does come from watching Footprints on the Moon. You know that creepy red-haired girl from Deep Red and Baron Blood? Well, Florinda goes all Polanski's The Tenant on her and slaps her in the face--hard!