Words can’t really do justice to the 1989 Italian giallo-style Arabella: Black Angel (Arabella l’angelo nero). Wildly raunchy, severely kinky, and absurdly convoluted, the film both titillates and confounds. I watched at least half of it with my jaw on the floor, either because of star Tinì Cansino’s various sexual exploits or because I couldn’t believe how insanely illogical the whole thing was.
I caught it on Tubi recently, having never heard of it but always eager to watch another Italo-erotic-thriller, especially one from that magical sweet spot year of 1989. I doubt many outside of Europe (or inside of it, for that matter) know the film, making it an easy choice for Lost and Found status.
The story of a devoted wife by day and a horny, nymphonaniac sex worker by night, Arabella begins with Cansino’s sultry Deborah driving recklessly while swigging some scotch she keeps between her thighs like any classy lady would. Deborah is unhappily married to an impotent, rageful writer of trashy erotic novels who’s confined to a wheelchair after an accident. Dissatisfied at home, she seeks ever-more dangerous sexual encounters under cover of darkness in order to get her kicks.
Early on, while trying to escape a police raid at a sex club, poor Deborah runs into a sadistic cop. He verbally degrades her, handcuffs her wrists behind her back, then roughly bends her over a car and sexually assaults her. Afterwords, the dirty cop finds the driver’s license Deborah accidentally left behind. Knowing her address now, he accosts her at her lavish home, threatening to extort her for money and demands sex right then and there. Deborah relents, but after a while fights back and accidentally kills the sick pig. Her husband witnesses the murder and the whole thing turns him on, plus shows him a way out of his pesky writer’s block. Soon he’s encouraging Deborah to continue her nightly sexcapades—after all, they’ll be great inspiration for his trashy sex novels.
What follows is a series of absurd encounters in which Deborah becomes implicated in murders she didn’t commit; some sick and twisted family dynamics (Deborah’s disapproving mother-in-law lives with them); plenty of laughingly bad vocal dubbing all around; a weirdly stiff, yet somehow still scorching hot performance by Cansino; and a subplot with a sexy lesbian police detective investigating the various crimes.
Throw all these elements together and you’ve got a wild feast for the senses. It would make a doozy of a double feature with another Italian sleazefest, Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper. Both films bring depravity to lows rarely reached in cinema.
Arabella: Black Angel is streaming on a few services right now, including Tubi and Prime.
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