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Lizards in Movies   Don't Torture a Duckling (1972)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This is a violent Italian Giallo about a child-killing priest, backwards superstitious villagers who enjoy beating women to death, and class conflict involving a rich and beautiful woman from the city visiting a poor rural village where she seduces boys and men alike (played by Barbara Bouchet, who might be the only reason to watch this disturbing mess.) Giallos are typically full of violence against women. The audience expects to see it in the genre just like they expect to see a killer wearing black gloves and beautiful nude women. But seeing a priest kill little boys was probably extremely shocking back in 1972. While women and children are brutalized and murdered in the movie, there are no ducklings being tortured, but there is a short scene of lizard abuse. In the opening scene we see a crazy-looking woman digging up a skeleton of a baby on a hill above a huge elevated highway outside a small village in Southern Italy. Then we see a boy standing on a road up at the highway level looking over the edge below where he spies a lizard on a rock. He pulls out his slingshot and shoots the lizard then smiles. It looks like he misses the lizard, but it twitches its tail, so maybe we're supposed to think that he hit the tail. The bottom line is that the boy is being cruel to a lizard. He is one of three delinquent tweenage boys who are later killed in the movie by a mysterious killer. Later we see the boy's terrified face after he was drowned in a pool of water. I have been told that the lizard is a male Common Wall Lizard, Podarcis muralis., found throughout Italy.