A Lizard in a Woman's Skin Movie Review

A Lizard in a Woman's Skin is a 1971 horror/thriller directed by Lucio Fulci and starring Florinda Bolkan, Stanley Baker, Leo Genn and Anita Strindberg.

A woman called Carol Hammond(Bolkan) is having weird dreams about her neighbour, Julia(Strindberg). Julia is a party girl and she is always having parties and taking part in questionable activities in her apartment. She has a husband called Frank(Jean Sorel) who is cheating on her and her dad is a top lawyer, Edmund Brighton(Genn) and he is protective of his daughter as he suspects that Frank is not faithful to his daughter. Carol has to go to a psychoanalyst as the dreams go from being lesbian in nature to murdering Julia. She sees two people in the dream who see her murdering Julia.

It turns out that the next day, Julia really has been murdered and Carol goes in for a look and faints. Inspector Corvin(Stanley Baker) comes to investigate. He finds a fur coat at the scene and they think that the killer is a woman. They get a confession from an Irish guy but he is just a nut. Carol sees the two people from her dream who are actually two weird hippies. She follows them but they don't know her. The cops take fingerprints and Carol's turns out to be a match. She is arrested. Carol's dad comes to visit her in custody and she tells him that she did not murder Julia. He and Frank go to see her psychoanalyst and he thinks that the two hippies from her dream might have been witnesses to the crime. Meanwhile, Frank is with his lover and someone is taking photographs. Carol has been put into a nursing home to rest. Someone is watching her. He comes up to her and chases her. It is one of the hippies from her dream. She runs away from him and sees a horrific vision of dogs being experimented on and she passes out.

She tells the staff about her vision, but they put it down to her mental condition. Carol's dad finds out that Frank has been unfaithful. He accuses Frank of framing Carol. He tells him that he could have 
used Carol's dream to set her up. Carol is contacted by one of the hippies and she goes to meet her,
and is attacked but the police come in time. Frank's daughter gets stabbed by one of the hippies and they get caught by the police. They confess to the stabbing and to attacking Carol but they have no information about the Julia killing. The cops don't think that they did it. Carol's dad kills himself and he sets himself up as the killer of Julia. Convenient?

Carol is at her father's grave when Inspector Corvin comes to talk to her. She gets caught in a lie and he realises that she DID kill Julia, with whom she had been having an affair. She thought that the hippies would squeal. She made up her dreams so that she would evidence of being mentally unbalanced and get a lighter sentence should she be caught. Carol is taken away by the Inspector.

This film was interesting. There were some weird images in this. The dream sequences were really unusual and psychedelic. They were so out there. The dog scene made me a little uncomfortable, as I always am with animal scenes in horror, but I know that it wasn't real, so I just go with it. I enjoyed the story, with its twists and turns and it was an enjoyable mystery on the whole. All in all, this was a decent film with some weird scenes, but a good murder mystery story at the centre of it. I liked it and I would recommend it to lovers of the genre. I will give it a 6/10.