Bruno Nicolai in Giallo

Perche' quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer (What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood Doing on Jennifer's Body) / Il tuo vizio é una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave (Your Vice is a Locked Door and Only I Have the Key)

The score for What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood Doing on Jennifer's Body sounds more conventionally like what one expects from a giallo, mixing easy bossa nova styled grooves with more experimental, ear-challenging suspense cues. Or – if one wants to be more cynical – it's more the Morricone rip-off.

There is, however, the odd exception such as track #9, a solo violin piece that seems inappropriate in the context of this disc but makes sense within the film itself.

Of the new material – the liner notes indicate that only around half the music Nicolai recorded was actually used by director Anthony Ascott/Giuliano Carnimeo, with most cues being heavily edited, the stand out is track #4. Unfortunately it's for the wrong reasons, being a comparatively long, generic and charm free piece of party music with keyboard and rhythms that sound too close to a Bontempi home organ for comfort before then degenerating into pointless drum soloing.

The music for Your Vice is a Locked Door and Only I Have the Key, meanwhile, doesn't sound much like what one expects from a giallo score at all, presenting a more classical, quasi-baroque idiom that is more reminiscent of some of Nicolai's work for Jesus Franco and Harry Alan Towers a few years earlier such as Justine and The Bloody Judge, with two basic adagios for oboe and strings and harpischord and strings rather than the expected Hammond organ and percussion. But while its generic qualities might be open to question – though the fact that the film itself presents something of a hybrid form with its use of Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat among other sources suggests Nicolai's choice of idiom is apt – the result is something that arguably stands up better to isolated listening.

Overall, two good scores – Jennifer enjoyable if run of the mill and Strange a pleasant surprise that presents a less derivative side to Nicolai's work – and a welcome taster of things to come from Digitmovies' Bruno Nicolai in Giallo collection.