‘Now I’ll have to cut across the old cemetery.’
A drifter goes to work for three sisters who live together in an isolated house. A few days later, an unknown killer begins targeting young blondes and removing their eyes…
Spanish Giallo from the mind of Euro Horror star Paul Naschy, who co-writes with director Carlos Aured under his real name of Jacinto Molina. Diana Lorys, Eduardo Calvo and Eva León head a solid supporting cast.
Hitchhiker Gilles (Naschy) is picked up on a lonely stretch of road by redhead Claude (Lorys), who offers him a job as caretaker at the house she shares with her sisters Nicole (León) and Ivette (Maria Perschy). It’s an unusual household; Perschy is confined to a wheelchair by the same accident that left Lorys with a prosthetic hand, and León lives in a permanent state of sexual arousal. Perschy is still under the care of local physician Dr. Phillipe (Calvo), who has arranged for the arrival of a live-in nurse, Michelle (Inés Morales). However, she’s not the woman that he was expecting. The nurse he’d initially engaged is found murdered later on, a crime investigated by Inspector Pierre (Antonio Pica).
As Naschy gets used to his new duties, he’s seduced by nymphomaniac León but begins to develop feelings for Lorys instead. However, like the sisters, he’s hiding secrets and suffers either flashbacks or visions where he is strangling an unknown woman. Other killings follow the first: young women in the nearby village, usually blue-eyed blondes, are slaughtered and found with their eyes gouged out. In the isolated house, Naschy and Lorys begin falling in love, and Perschy suspects Morales is drugging her milk. And who is on the end of the line when the nurse makes secret phone calls? The body count continues to rise, and then Pica discovers the truth behind Naschy’s secret past.
It was third time lucky for Naschy in his excursions into the world of the Giallo. Earlier efforts ‘Seven Murders For Scotland Yard/Jack the Ripper of London/Jack el destripador de Londres (1971) and ‘The Crimes of Petiot/Los crímenes de Petiot (1973) had been makeweight at best, suffering from poor dramatic structure and shaky narrative. However, this script from Naschy’s original story is tighter, and the mystery develops with a better focus. The action stays mostly within the confines of the house, much like Robert Siodmak’s classic noir mystery ‘The Spiral Staircase’ (1946), with which the film bears some slight resemblance.
It’s also noticeable that Aured is a talented director who knows how to use both the striking mountain locations and the shadowy interiors to create a sense of creeping dread. Working with cinematographer Francisco Sánchez, he delivers a picture that approaches some of the visual qualities of the best Italian Giallo films, even if it doesn’t contain some of the trademark flourishes of the most outstanding examples.
One of the film’s most notable aspects is the unusual sound design that utilises the music of Juan Carlos Calderón. Some of this is strangely inappropriate; a jaunty theme reoccurs at serious moments, and the lovemaking between Naschy and Lorys takes place in complete silence. The French nursery rhyme ‘Frère Jacques’ tinkling refrain is also highly effective during the suspense sequences and serves more than just as the killer’s musical motif. This oddly fractured approach to the soundtrack proves to be quite a compelling and unsettling device.
The cast performs capably enough, with Naschy his usual dark and brooding self, and there are some bloody moments for those seeking a gorier edge with their Giallo thrills. However, like many of its kind, the outcome is a little on the disappointing side. The red herrings scattered on the way are perhaps discarded a little too early, and when the final revelation comes, it seems a bit hurried as a consequence. Some story threads don’t tie up satisfactorily either, with a significant omission being the full details of the sisters’ backstory. Also, the killer seems endowed with twin superpowers, that of always being in the right place at the right time to find an isolated victim and never being spotted by anyone else in the act or just getting about in general.
Aured was born in Spain in 1937and probably first crossed paths with Naschy when he worked as the assistant director on ‘La noche de Walpurgis’ (1971), one of the series of Waldemar Daninsky werewolf pictures that made the star’s name. The two collaborated again on Aured’s debut directing assignment ‘Horror Rises from the Tomb/El espanto surge de la tumba’ (1973), with Naschy again on typewriter duty. In fact, the two worked together on four out of the first half dozen of Aured’s directorial credits. After their final collaboration in 1975, however, Aured forsook frightmares for more comedic material that often verged on the Adult market. He returned to horror for his last project, the obscure ‘Atrapados en el miedo’ (1985), which only seems to have been released in Spain and West Germany. He passed away in 2008.
Heroine Lorys was a mainstay of European genre cinema throughout the 1960s and 1970s, her career neatly bookended by the start of one and the end of the other. Her first significant credit was in Jesus Franco’s ‘The Awful Dr. Orlof/Gritos en la noche’ (1962), but she became more familiar to fans of the Euro-Western, beginning with ‘Gunfighters of Casa Grande’ (1964) and including ‘Villa Rides’ (1968) with Robert Mitchum and Yul Brynner and ‘Bad Man’s River’ (1974) which starred Lee Van Cleef. There were also the inevitable Eurospy antics in ‘Lightning Bolt/Gemini 13’ (1966), the dreary ‘OK Yevtushenko/Somebody’s Stolen Our Russian Spy’ (1968) and the rather prosaic ‘SuperArgo and the Faceless Giants (1968). She returned to horror with Amando de Ossorio’s vampire tale ‘Malenka/Fangs of the Living Dead’ (1969) and reteamed with Franco for ‘The Bloody Judge’ (1970) with Christopher Lee. As the seventies wore on, she moved increasingly television but retired in 1981. She returned to the big screen briefly for crime drama ‘Un hombre de porvenir’ (2010) but has not surfaced again since.
A quality thriller that doesn’t quite reach the top rank but only falls a little short.
Mark David Welsh 