Giallo #6: "A Lizard in a Woman's Skin" (1971)

A woman awakens from a recurring dream, an apparent lesbian fantasy, in which she in fact, murders her lover, who is in actuality, her next-door neighbor. When the police knock on the door and every aspect of her nightmare has indeed come to fruition, Carol (played by Florinda Bolkan) becomes frightfully worried that she's been set-up, or indeed the rightful killer.
-

-

Sound familiar? This 'woman-in-peril' trope of the giallo movement continues here (and will show up again in 1972's "All the Colors of the Dark") with Lucio Fulci's "A Lizard in a Woman's Skin," a film that conceptually may appear mightily familiar, but in fact, has a remarkably noticeable difference.
-
As mentioned previously, Florinda Bolkan (who looks quite a bit like Juliana Marguiles) plays Carol, a rich married woman who's not only suspected by the police but suspected by herself in the death of her next-door neighbor, a veracious partier and seldom-clothed Julia.
-
Carol's hightened paranoia takes extreme turns during a midway chase through an abandoned church (featuring some terrifically Italian wide shots), an encounter at a dilapidated theater (which looks quite like the one from Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange," I might say) and then highlighted by a terrible fright from a pack of resting bats - yeesh. 
-
Without divulging too much, "A Lizard in a Woman's Skin" (also known as "Schizoid" in the United States) adeptly, surprisingly, turns from standard-order womanized paranoia to a complex, psychoanalytical thriller with more than a few twists to the timeworn formula.
-
If nothing else, the film (a grisly, half-diverting psycho-mystery) makes good in its effort to divert our expectations from the typical giallo exercise, managing to legitimately surprise us with its frank, unsuspecting conclusion. [C+]