An old Italian murder mystery greatly enhanced with a generous helping of lovely boobs and that bright red movie blood. I’ve often thought someone should have created a lipstick with the name Italian Movie Blood.

There isn’t much to talk about here except that much of the incidental dialog is hilariously insipid, and despite being basically a sexy slasher film you’ll find yourself nodding off with the plodding pace of it. About two thirds the way into the film all the main ladies have been done in, most of them off camera, and you’re wondering what they’re going to do to fill the last thirty minutes.

What they do is introduce the killer’s causal psychosis, which has something to do with dolls and cliffs and a deadly fall. And so, he kills and dismembers pretty ladies for a living as a result. The dismembering part isn’t trivial, it looks like a lot of labor. Each bag of gorgeous girl is shouldered and slowly carried away after locking up the cliff-side villa and presumably buried somewhere. Such bother!

There are too many shrieking birds used for jump scares, and too many useless and gob-struck men. Also, within about ten minutes you know who the killer is. All the obvious decoys are too obvious and all the acting of the kind we now call “scene chewing”. Also this being a typical Italian film, everyone is dubbed, and so there’re a lot of sounds that don’t seem to need to come out of certain mouths. It’s fine for a lark, of course, these were a typical date movie for a generation (mine). And I think the idea was to give the girl a good excuse to get close to her date, always a thrill for shy boys.

On the other hand, what is the point of these things? Sex and violence spot on the nose is an odd genre when you actually spell it out. You are meant to find the victims desirable (you get to see plenty of their perfect figures) and then you watch them slaughtered by a frail looking dude (with the skinniest wrists!) and you think, Aw, what a waste. Kill the other one now. Etc. Is the idea one of attraction and loss, perhaps? A kind of dangling of desire fulfillment only to have it pulled savagely out of grasp. If there were no murder sequences would it just be soft-core porn? Is the whole thing a kind of wicked excuse just to show off amazing boobs?

It’s a little bit interesting for looking at nearly fifty year old Italian villages, and for that one really lovely, big-eyed girl, who doesn’t even get her own death scene.

For freebies on Prime