Seems there's a fine line between quirky psychedelic gialli like this film and Baba Yaga and interminable garbage like Tinto Brass's deadly sweet and Jess Franco's tramp spew Succubus. While not a jaw dropping amazing film, Guilio Questi's Death Laid an Egg won me over due to its bizarre chicken theme.Marco is part of a company involved in high-tech chicken production somewhere in Italy, along with wife Anna (played by the very pretty Gina Lollobridgia) and his lodger Gabrielle. Marco is having an affair with Gabrielle, and Gina has the hots for Gabrielle, and Marco likes to kill prozzies in a hotel in the EUR (or does he?), plus Gabrielle is having an affair with another guy who works for the chicken company, who also witnessed Marco killing a hooker, plus Gina and Anna want to dress up as hookers to catch Marco.That's a fair sized giallo plot there, but all this is based around chicken production, chicken promotion, chicken committees, experimental chicken mutations, and chicken artwork. Often characters stand in rooms where a giant laminated egg draws your attention. You also have Cubist chicken paintings, and one scene where a giant chicken looms over the workers like Big Brother.There is a fairly standard giallo plot in here, but the whole film is weird as hell and while not action packed will carry you to the end in order for you to find out what the hell was going on.What was all the stuff with the strange runes on the headscarf? Didn't catch that bit...

Death Laid An Egg is truly a one off. While it does qualify as an early example of the giallo, more than anything it's a very weird art film. Director Giulio Questi seems to have been highly influenced by the New Wave, so the aesthetic is often very much at odds with the one we are used to in most other gialli. It seems more indebted to Jean Luc Godard than Mario Bava most of the time. There is even one very disturbing scene of a car crash that feels like a direct descendant of the bizarre and disturbing imagery from Week-End. This scene like many others utilises a very bold editing technique that pre-dates the similar work of Nicolas Roeg. There is no doubt that visually this is a very fascinating film. It mixes both surrealism and pop art to create a very weird atmosphere. But the oddness is certainly not limited to the aesthetics. The musical score by Bruno Maderna is very experimental indeed and very persistent. It fills most of the film, its avant-garde nature ideally suited. Then of course we have the setting. A chicken farm where bizarre scientific experiments are the order of the day is hardly a typical set-up for an Italian thriller. Moreover, in one gloriously oddball science fiction moment we discover that the scientists have developed a kind of headless and wingless chicken creature which they hope will make them very rich by turning the animal into nothing more than a hideous ready-made blob of meat. This sort of horrific surrealism isn't a far cry from the kinds of thing David Lynch would put into Eraserhead. But in this film it does have an obvious point, as it raises the question of where the moral line is in producing genetically modified animals for food. It's not exactly common-place for a giallo to raise important issues.Inside all this weirdness is a drama about a man, his wife, her assistant and a publicity agent from the egg people. It turns out that they are having different illicit relationships behind the other's backs. And there are different plots to do away with each other. On top of this the main man is seen at the beginning of the movie committing an act of brutal violence where he murders a woman in a motel room in a bravura opening scene that is expertly inter-cut with many edits of scenes showing a plethora of other odd and fetishistic behaviour happening simultaneously in the same motel. I guess the implication is that behind closed doors everybody is socially deviant in some way. As the film progresses this murderer and adulterer is shown to be the only one with the morality to reject the idea of the monster chickens. Overall there are several layers of complexity here and this has to be a re-watchable film for this reason. It's very much for people with a taste for the left-field and the bizarre. It's ridiculous it hasn't been given a proper DVD release.

The first thing you will notice about Death Laid an egg is it's completely ridiculous title, and I've got to say that it's a fitting one because this film is as silly and as convoluted as Giallo get, and considering some entries in the cycle - that really is saying something! Giulio Questi's film takes in ideas of prostitution, adultery and monsters on a chicken farm and blends it all into one less than coherent piece. Normally, this would be the sort of Giallo that annoys me; as aside from its ridiculous plot, it's also short on tension, stylish murders and nudity. However, the film has a certain straight faced ineptness about it that serves in making it all the more compelling, as the lack of tension is masked over with an idea of the unknown - as at no point in this film do you know what the director is going to present us with next! The plot follows a four way relationship between a man, his wife, her assistant and a publicity agent, who witnessed the man apparently committing an act of murder. The plot thickens as the man and his wife own a chicken farm; and a scientist working there manages to create headless and wingless monster chickens!It's a shame that this film doesn't benefit from competent writing as the direction is superb and the cast do well in their respective roles. It would seem that writer-director Questi had a few ideas to make a film out of, and decided to land them all in the same piece. The idea of the 'monster chickens' wouldn't be out of place in a Sci-Fi film, while the sub-plot revolving around the wife and her assistant is more along the lines of the pseudo-lesbianism in later Italian films such as The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion. Death Laid an Egg is still an interesting Giallo, however, as it came early on in the cycle and the fact that the director is happy to experiment with so many different and offsetting themes is admirable as the genre was still in it's infancy at the time. The film benefits from a beautiful pair of female performers in Ewa Aulin and Gina Lollobrigida, and all of their scenes are the highlights of the film. The ending is perhaps the worst aspect of the movie, as it just sort of comes out nowhere and gives the film what is possibly the most abrupt conclusion in Giallo history. But even so, this is a brilliantly surreal film and it keeps itself going nicely, even when the plot does become a little too incoherent.

"Death Laid an Egg" by Giulio Questi is a wonderful giallo full of surrealism.Mark only married his wife Anna because of her chicken fortune.They run a chicken farm between the two of them.Mark has been having several affairs including one with Gabriella.Things start to complicate when Gabriella moves in with Mark and Anna.Gabriella and Mark continue their affair and plot Anna's death."Death Laid an Egg" is a psychedelic giallo that has to be seen to be believed.The acting by Gina Lollobrigida and Jean-Louis Trintignant is excellent and the score by Bruno Maderna fits the mood perfectly.So if you like weird Italian cinema give this one a look.My other recommendations:"Autopsy" by Armando Crispino and "A Quiet Place in the Country" by Elio Petri.