'Body Puzzle' (1992) – Lamberto Bava.

Hugely admired Italian horror icon, Lamberto Bava’s spectacularly sanguineous ‘Body Puzzle’ (1992) has lost none of its morbidly off-colour fascination and continues to beguile the world's Giallo addicts! Not only one of the more luminous examples of marrow-freezing, late-period Gialli, but an exquisitely thrilling example of maestro, Bava's uniquely twisted art. Utilizing a Columbo-like approach, viewers are immediately aware of the graphic, eviscerating mania of Body Puzzle’s sublimely sick-headed, body perforating protagonist (François Montagut). Unmasked at the very beginning of the film, the catalyst for his manifestly malevolent, viscera-pilfering peccadillo remains intriguingly obscured.

The persistently exhausted Detective, Michele Livet is performed with a weathered charm by versatile character actor, Tomas Arana. Poor Michele now has the singularly ignominious task of having to quite literally piece together the gruesomely excised physical evidence! His only viable lead being that the random slayings appear to be oppressively encircling the beautiful Book Editor, Tracy Grant (Joanna ‘Death Before Dishonor’ Pacula). Soon their disparate fates become ardently intertwined as, Tracy's stalwart cop protector is inexorably drawn ever deeper into her darkly alluring vortex of sex and encroaching danger!

As the abhorrent killer’s apparently motiveless lust for histrionic organ harvesting reaches some vile apotheosis, Michele’s stresses are compounded by prototypically dour Police Chief Boss (Gianni ‘Sartana’ Garko) bluntly warning his beleaguered, increasingly vexed subordinate that, Michele must very soon bring the murderous miscreant to book or face extreme censure from his lofty superiors.

Maestro, Lamberto Bava’s frequently exhilarating, consistently engaging thriller is no less stylishly handled than his sublime 1980s classic, the razor-sharp, arterial-spraying aria ‘Blade in the Dark’ (1983). Body Puzzle’s dynamic set-pieces and deliriously convoluted narrative offers Giallo junkies a dizzyingly brutal hit of anatomically deviant death, and generously plasmatic overspills from one of Italian cinema’s more visually exciting, perversely-minded genre icons.