#cinevox

Listen to 4 tracks by Riz Ortolani from the original soundtrack album “La Ragazza dal Pigiama Giallo” (Cinevox Records, MDF 33.119, Italy, 1978)

Yes, it’s Giallo soundtrack time. Giallo, that particularly lurid and trashy seam of crime/ thriller/ horror cinema that blossomed (or maybe bred, like bacteria, would be a more apt verb) in Italy between the late 1960s and 1970s. Who is the girl in the yellow pyjamas? Well, in true Giallo style she’s the dead woman burnt beyond recognition on a beach before the film even starts, and therein lies the problematic nature of the genre; with intersecting tropes such as the objectification, menacing, torturing and murdering of women, or female characters who, if not killed off, are invariably psychotic, duplicitous, nymphomaniacs or addicted to drugs, these films make for difficult viewing in 2020. Yes, some film fans love these movies for their stylish interiors, enviable retro clothes, glamorous European locations and gorgeous acting leads, but for me, it’s the music, which suits me just fine; I can stick on a record for 35 minutes instead of watching two hours of casually gratuitous misogyny, often badly dubbed into Italian.

Apart from some lush, light funk orchestral cues found on the LP, check out the 15 minute sound clip to hear downtempo Euro slow-jam sleaze, tense electronics, a brazen Giorgio Moroder rip-off and the fabulously deadpan voice of Amanda Lear.  Who? you ask. No, I’d never heard of her either, but we will all know her as the woman taking her black panther for a stroll on the front cover of the second Roxy Music album, ‘For Your Pleasure’. She was a model from the mid 1960s, became a European disco sensation in the late 70s and then settled into a career as a popular host on 1980s Italian television. She even managed to squeeze in a book about her long and close friendship with Salvador Dali.

For the international version of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, Dario Argento contracted Goblin to write a score, which brought a distinctly proggy (and Italian) vibe to the American film.  Electric guitars and an assortment of percussive instruments join the keyboards and bass through a wide range of styles, with tribal chanting and ragtime piano riffing probably being the two furthest points on the score’s mood spectrum. 

More standard prog rock does appear, as with the fairly quick “Zaratozom”, and it’s with these pieces that the band seems most confident, though they don’t falter on the steps outside their comfort zone.  There’s also a bit of a weird split between full ‘songs’ and what are essentially looped cues, but the jumping about with styles (there’s even a take on country western at one point) helps minimize the dissonance of those shifts.  On the down-side, the band’s apparent urge to show off how wide a range they could make the music cover leads to it feeling more like a style demo reel than a cohesive score, and the diversity of the tracks ends up running into itself too often for any individual piece to end up particularly memorable.

Here’s the alternate cover art.

The cover art used in Japan.

In France.

In Germany.

For an Italian reissue.

Another Italian reissue.

Yet another Italian reissue.

And the 2018 remastered reissue.