‘I’ll boot her rump if I catch her spooning with a boy.’
A young woman is stabbed to death in broad daylight on the streets of Barcelona, and her left eye is removed. The body is discovered by one of a party of tourists, and subsequent killings put all of them under suspicion…
Uneven, somewhat tatty Giallo effort from director Umberto Lenzi, making his fifth and final excursion into these murky cinematic waters. Martine Brochard and John Richardson take the leading roles, with able support from a reliable multi-national cast, including George Rigaud and Silvia Solar.
Due to fly to a medical clinic in New York, the troubled Alma Burton (Marta May) cancels her reservation at the last moment and boards a flight to Barcelona instead. In the Spanish City, a group of American holidaymakers are seeing the sights, courtesy of their slimy tour guide, Martinez (Raf Baldassarre). During one stop in a downtown area, a young woman is brutally stabbed to death nearby. The killer has time to gouge out the victim’s left eye before fleeing the scene, leaving the body to be found by priest Rev. Bronson (Rigaud). Hard on his heels is secretary Paulette (Brochard), who gets another surprise when she suddenly comes face to face with her boss, Mark Burton (Richardson).
Brochard and Richardson have more than a professional relationship, and she has joined the tour to get some alone time to figure things out. Richardson is married to May, who he believes has gone to New York to get treatment for a nervous breakdown. As far as Richardson is concerned, the marriage is over, but Brochard is still reluctant to commit to a future with him. The group visits a carnival, but the killer strikes again, slaughtering young teenager Peggy Randall (Olga Montes) in the ghost train. Inspector Tudela (Andrés Mejuto) begins to suspect Richardson, but the businessman has discovered that his wife is in Barcelona and is convinced of her guilt.
Director Lenzi, who co-wrote the script with Félix Tusell, had plenty of experience with the Giallo horror thriller by the time this production rolled around. He’d been in on the ground floor, even getting ‘Orgasmo/Paranoia’ (1969) into theatres almost a year before Dario Argento’s landmark debut ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage/L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo’ (1970). That film launched the Italian Giallo craze, one of the major threads of Italian genre cinema for the next four years. Unfortunately, by the time his final effort hit the screens, the public’s appetite for bloody murder mysteries was waning, and that’s reflected in the poor quality of this effort, which seems to have been rather hastily assembled.
Quite often, audiences were required to maintain high levels of suspension of debrief when viewing Gialli due to wild and woolly storylines that often sacrificed logic in favour of surprises and stylish technical work. Usually, the denouement places the greatest strain on credibility, and in this regard, Lenzi certainly doesn’t disappoint. It is original; you have to give him that, but it’s also very silly and leaves a lot of questions unanswered. However, that’s not the real problem. Worse, the entire narrative is very contrived and never convinces. Individual scenes and events are fine, but when jammed all together, they make for an awkward and clumsy story, which lacks in execution as well as in its basic concept.
With a series of killings centred around a group of tourists, what police inspector in his right mind would let the tour carry on with its itinerary? Eventually, Inspector Mejuto does decide to confiscate all their passports, but it’s a bit late by then, what with all the eye-gouging and brutal murders. Some of our happy band also seem quite unfazed by the whole business. Robby Alvarado (Daniele Vargas) and frustrated wife Gail (Solar) carry on bickering, precocious teen Jenny (Verónica Miriel) tries to sneak off the disco rather than watch a boring flamenco exhibition (and gets slashed by the killer as punishment), and Rigaud wanders around in an amiable haze looking at church architecture. I mean, why let a few savage slayings spoil your holiday fun, right?
Also in the party are photographer Lisa Sanders (Mirta Miller) and her model Naiba Campbell (Ines Pellegrini), who are kind enough to be lesbian lovers and provide Lenzi’s camera with the requisite quota of casual nudity. However, it’s not their contribution which gives proceedings its unpleasantly sleazy undercurrent, nor is it the killings, which are mostly brief and relatively bloodless, save for a surprisingly savage sequence in a bathroom. No, instead, it’s the behaviour of most of the male characters, who never miss a chance to leer at any young female who crosses their path, most of whom don’t look old enough to even qualify as jailbait. Yes, you don’t expect nuanced and enlightened portrayals of gender politics in this type of film from the 1970s. Still, it’s rare to see an example where this objectification is so persistent and involves girls this young. Of course, you could argue that it’s Lenzi’s way of maintaining our suspicions about each character. However, it’s lazy at best, about as subtle as a brick to the face and doesn’t even make sense in terms of the story as it’s never suggested at any stage that the crimes have a sexual motivation.
Of course, there’s also the obligatory flashback to a past incident that provides a clue to the current goings-on. This takes the form of a murder almost a year earlier near the marital home of Richardson and May. It just might be connected because a young girl was stabbed and mutilated in precisely the same way. On the day of the murder, Richardson returned home to find May stretched out unconscious next to their pool, a blood-stained dagger in her right hand and a human eye lying in the grass nearby. We hear that a vagrant was blamed for the crime but never stood trial as he committed suicide as the forces of law and order closed in. Leaving aside the fact that Richardson must have been living with the belief that his wife was a killer and did nothing about it for a year, he also experiences an epiphany while recounting the memory to Inspector Mejuto. The killer is right-handed, and the dagger was lying in her right hand by the pool, but, heavens above, she’s actually left-handed! Wow. It’s taken him about a year to work this out. I guess they didn’t have a very close marriage. Nevertheless, I revoke his membership of the Sherlock Holmes Club with immediate effect.
The only positives here are the vigorous pace and an excellent score from Bruno Nicolai. Otherwise, the film has no real technical merit beyond bland professionalism and a few nice touches, such as dressing the vacationers in identical scarlet rain slickers during a downpour, thus providing the killer with a ready-made disguise and allowing a couple of atmospheric visual moments. The acting is a little hit-and-miss, too, with most of the cast saddled with characters that possess little more than one defining personality trait that they are obliged to repeat over and over again throughout the film. Brochard fares better with her role, but her interactions with Richardson don’t have much dramatic weight due to his rather stiff, robotic performance.
Born in England in 1934, Richardson began his career with an uncredited bit in Titanic disaster movie ‘A Night to Remember’ (1958), but got his first big break as the hero of Mario Bava’s horror classic ‘The Mask of Satan/Black Sunday/La Maschera del demonio’ (1960). This led to a significant supporting role in the American film ‘Pirates of Tortuga (1961), but this was a low-budget Sam Katzman production, and his career stalled. Hammer Studios came to his rescue, casting him in two of their biggest non-horror productions of the 1960s, opposite two of the great screen beauties of the era. First, he dallied with Ursula Andress in the lost city of Kor in H Rider Haggard’s famous tale of immortality ‘She’ (1965) and then with Raquel Welch and some Ray Harryhausen dinosaurs in the historically rather dubious ‘One Million Years B.C.’ (1966).
These proved to be the highlights of his career, with most of his subsequent films shot in Italy, including a handful of undistinguished Spaghetti Westerns. There was a supporting role in the Barbra Streisand vehicle ‘On A Clear Day You Can See Forever’ (1970) as well as further trips into the Giallo arena with Sergio Martino’s ‘Torso/I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale’ (1973), Tano Cimarosa’s ‘Reflections In Black/Il vizio ha le calze nere’ (1975) and Ferdinando Baldi’s ‘Nine Guests for a Crime/Nove ospiti per un delitto’ (1977). Later projects included a couple of Alfonso Brescia’s ‘Star Wars’ (1977) knockoffs, the unbearable tedious ‘War of the Planets/Anno zero – Guerra nello spazio’ (1977) and ‘Battle of the Stars/Battaglie negli spazi stellari’ (1978) which wasn’t much better.
Check your brain at the door, and you may get something out of it.
Mark David Welsh 