So this next volume of gialli gets back to the roots — they’re all Italian, and all from the ’70s. But they’re not quite all in the classic mode.

Reflections in Black, though, is. This is the most classically styled giallo of this bunch. It’s got a luridly sexual premise (various shadowy elites have a secret cabal/sex club), complete with obligatory nudity; it’s got corrupt/bumbling cops who are unwilling to go after powerful suspects; and, of course, it has the classic black-glove straight-razor killings.

It also has that classic-to-me element of having a too-large cast full of people who look far too much alike (Three red-haired women in the movie! Three!). The gigantic cast, full of twisty relationships that all matter to the plot, is probably the biggest negative of the movie — you practically need a spreadsheet to keep the characters straight even if you’re able to tell them apart on sight, and the explanation of motives ends up getting more than slightly convoluted. But if you’re willing to just kinda roll with it, you’ll get what you came for.

Rings of Fear is also classically styled, but in the more decadent, later-period mode. This is from the “girls in trouble” subgenre, and is set in a high school where one of the girls has been killed, after seemingly having been caught up in some unsavory sexual activities. The movie is not shy about giving us naked high school girls, because, well, because 1970s Italy. (Relatedly, giving away the murder weapon here would be a spoiler, but let’s just say that this is implausibly the second giallo I’ve seen to have someone die in this way, and I might have imagined going my entire life without seeing even one.)

We’ve got a bunch of other killings here, of course, including some that go beyond the standard glove-and-razor stuff — a bunch of marbles rolling down a staircase is maybe the most entertaining (if slightly absurd) one.

The main downside is that the plot is overstuffed and disjointed; there are just too many different things going on, such that solving the murder ends up being like 1/4 of the movie’s total resolution, and the multiple minor endings don’t quite add up to the dramatic impact of one major ending. Dock it a half-star for that, maybe.

The last movie of this trio, A.A.A. Masseuse, Good-Looking, Offers Her Services is the one that knocks us out of pure classicism. Oh, sure, it has a lot of the standard elements — there is a black-glove razor killing, there is a lot of sex in it — but it’s weird.

The movie starts out with a daughter leaving home to work as a masseuse. I initially took this literally, as does the client of her first job, who hired her to help his mom’s sciatica, which gets embarrassing when she comes out of the changing room naked. Oh, she’s working as that kind of masseuse, right.

So there’s a ton of family drama here, there’s the difficulties of getting established in a new career (including pimps threatening/cajoling her to come work for them), and it honestly just seems like it’s more of a sex movie or character piece, some kind of Italian Midnight Cowboy. But finally, 30 minutes into the movie, we get our first killing, and it becomes a giallo.

I thought this was going to end up as something of a dud, but by the end of the movie, it had won me over, and so I rate it all the way up at replacement level — it’s a giallo that you’ll like if you like gialli, if you give it time to get going.