Don’t Torture a Duckling — 4K

No, it’s not about the secret life of Scrooge McDuck — reviewer Charlie Largent takes the measure of Lucio Fulci’s delirious giallo about horrible crimes and the ugly human responses they bring about — undue suspicion, false accusations, hysteria, more violence. Some pretty twisted people are involved, played by a Class-A cast: Florinda Bolkan, Barbara Bouchet, Tomas Milian, Irene Papas; the new UHD transfer is a beauty.

Don’t Torture a Duckling
1972 – 105 Min. Min.
Arrow Video – 4K Ultra HD
Color – 2:35 Widescreen, 1:66 Widescreen, 1:37 Academy
Starring Florinda Bolkan, Barbara Bouchet, Tomas Milian, Irene Papas
Written by Lucio Fulci, Roberto Gianviti, Gianfranco Clerici
Directed by Lucio Fulci

Note: Charlie Largent’s original Blu-ray review is from 2017.  We couldn’t improve on it, except to add a couple of notes on the new 4K presentation.

Lucio Fulci’s most consistent trait might have been his instability. In fact it may have been the Italian director’s defining quality; lingering throughout his films is the inescapable notion that, no matter how stylish or finely-tuned his mise en scene, he will surely find a way to fly off the rails and take everyone with him.

Fulci made his rep in the late 70’s and early 80’s with a series of crassly exploitative horror films, high on gore and low on logic. Nevertheless he began his career on his best behavior with 1959’s Il Ladri, an innocuous farce starring Totò followed by a spate of comic crime capers featuring the the execrable comedy duo of Franco and Cicco. He finally found his sweet spot in 1969 with the oft-told tale of Beatrice Cenci.

Cenci was a serious potboiler with a taste for medieval violence and a deep disdain for the church, themes that were ready-made for the intemperate director (in America the film was given the Fulci-friendly title, The Conspiracy of Torture). He followed up with his own entry in the Giallo Sweepstakes, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, and then began production of what would be one of his most stylish and finely-tuned films, Don’t Torture a Duckling. Do you see where this is going?

Duckling opens in a rural town in Southern Italy, a tiny village that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Telemaco Signorini’s sun drenched paintings of provincial life in the 19th century. That spell is broken by the modern freeway that surrounds the village; it underlines the film’s contemporary nature while signaling the villager’s sense of entrapment: the little hamlet has suffered a recent string of murders, all of them children, and the prevailing mood is close to panic as an ineffectual police force deals with an increasingly hostile townspeople.

The mood is not helped by the presence of two women haunting the landscape, each a different kind of vamp; a vacationing sex kitten (Barbara Bouchet) who spends her days sipping orange juice in the nude while attempting to seduce 10 year-olds, and a self-proclaimed witch (Florinda Bolkan) who scowls and prowls through the village hidden beneath a shawl, her talons still dirty from the child’s skeleton she’s just exhumed.

Fulci and his co-writers, Roberto Gianviti and Gianfranco Clerici, do enjoy keeping us guessing; the cast is littered with herrings and all but one of them are red. And for once Fulci lets his themes develop with a minimum of his usual detours into gory set-pieces or absurdly gratuitous sexcapades. Fulci deftly juggles the conflicts between the spiritual aspirations of the villagers and the impure aspects of their superstitions, the implication being that the townspeople’s collective unconscious is responsible for the mysterious specter acting out a ritualistic blood war between church and state.

The cast is uniformly excellent including the great Irene Papas as a careworn mother with a secret and Ugo D’Alessio as a pragmatic but warm-hearted police captain. Tomas Milian, who played everything from Raphael in 1965’s The Agony and the Ecstasy to a veritable army of pistol-packing vigilantes in some of Italy’s finest spaghetti westerns, turns in a close-to-the-vest performance as an inquisitive reporter.

As convoluted as the mystery is, there’s no heavy lifting to the guessing game and the revelation of the murderer’s identity is a bit of a ho-hum affair. But Fulci’s direction is as assured as it ever was, helped immensely by the cinematographer Sergio D’Offizi whose chiaroscuro lighting comes with style to burn. To be sure, the zoom-happy Fulci lacked the elegance of De Palma (Duckling seems, at best, like a rough sketch for a De Palma movie) but the New Jersey native with a penchant for cheeky camera moves must have been paying close attention to what Fulci was up to; in some respects The Fury and Dressed to Kill would not have found their demented poetry without Fulci’s groundwork.

Which brings us to the moment where Fulci, being Fulci, decides things have been proceeding too smoothly and takes that inevitable detour to crazy town. Suffice to say most serious directors of serious horror films do not want their audience collapsing in laughter during the finale of their film. Let’s just say that, while De Palma most likely welcomed the guffaws, we’ll never really know about Lucio.

Technical Information by Glenn Erickson

Arrow Video’s 4K Ultra HD of Don’t Torture a Duckling is a new 4K restoration from the original camera negative, with Dolby Vision and HDR10. Arrow gives Fulci’s film the full package, with full original Italian and English dub soundtracks, and a full set of English subtitles.

As is the custom with Arrow, this particular product is a 4K Ultra HD – only presentation, with no standard Blu-ray encoding.

The video quality of the 4K is pretty much Charlie Largent’s assessment from 2017, with more emphasis on contrast range: “absolutely stellar replication of Sergio D’Offizi’s cinematography.” Arrow’s package text explains that the new 2025 master was taken directly from the original Techniscope negative … the fascinating 2-perf format concocted by Technicolor to put color features in the grasp of more producers. Flat lenses yielded sharper images with less light than anamorphic setups, which meant that Technicolor printing produced perfectly fine 35mm ‘scope prints. The quality depended on the skill of the cameraman and especially the eye of the operator pulling focus.

Arrow’s fine extras have been ported over from the old Blu-ray. Largent made special note of the audio commentary from Troy Howarth, author of So Deadly, So Perverse, a history of Giallo films, and the video presentation The Blood of Innocents by Mikel J. Koven, author of La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film.

Don’t Torture a Duckling
4K Ultra HD rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Troy Howarth
Video discussion Giallo a la Campagna with Mikel J. Koven
Video essay Hell is Already in Us by critic Kat Ellinger
Interviews:
Lucio Fulci Remembers from 1988 (audio)
Who Killed Donald Duck with Barbara Bouchet
Those Days with Lucio with Florinda Bolkan
The DP’s Eye with cinematographer Sergio D’Offizi
From the Cutting Table with editor Bruno Micheli
Endless Torture with makeup artist Maurizio Trani
Theatrical trailer
Illustrated collector’s booklet with essays by Barry Forshaw (on Fulci) and Howard Hughes (on Riz
Newly commissioned artwork by Ilan Sheady
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD in Keep case
Reviewed: March 1, 2025
(7286largduck)

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Text © Copyright 2017, 2025 Charlie Largent