‘I can leave my wife at home on certain occasions, but not my camera.’
A troubled actor returns to visit his mother after a 15-year absence. His friends join him at her remote mansion, but one of them is murdered, and more killings follow…
Veteran director Riccardo Freda closes out a career lasting more than four decades with this Italian-French co-production. Actors Anita Strindberg, John Richardson and Stefano Patrizi are on hand for his final curtain.
A murder scene in director Hans Schwarz’s (Henri Garcin) latest film turns dangerous when actor Michael Stanford (Patrizi) gets carried away strangling his colleague Beryl Fisher (Laura Gemser). Everyone is visibly shaken, not least Patrizi, who lapsed into an apparent trance during the action. Afterwards, he suddenly feels an overwhelming compulsion to visit his mother, Glenda (Strindberg), who lives at a remote chateau with only her taciturn butler, Otto (Richardson), for company. The young artiste takes along his girlfriend, Debora (Dionisio) but he almost loses control of the car on the way there when he has a sudden flashback of the death of his father, a famous conductor. As a young child, he witnessed the maestro’s sudden collapse on stage while watching from the audience with his mother.
Arriving at Strindberg’s remote villa, Patrizi feels the need to keep his relationship with Dionisio a secret and introduces her as his secretary. The next day, Gemser and director Garcin arrive to stay for the weekend, accompanied by his assistant, Shirley Dawson (Martine Brochard). Richardson refuses to let Garcin take his photograph when the group arrive, and, as a result, the after-dinner conversation progresses from superstition to various aspects of the occult. That night, during one of the frequent power outages, Dionisio hears a scream, and Gemser is seemingly attacked in her bath by an assailant wearing black gloves. In the morning, Patrizi finds Richardson cleaning up dirty boot marks in the corridor outside the guest bedrooms.
The Giallo film is usually summarised as a murder mystery or thriller with horror elements due to the sometimes graphic and gory nature of its kills. Occasionally, however, these films leant more heavily into the supernatural, and that’s the case here, with Freda bringing in those aspects through dreams and visions. In one extended nightmare sequence, Dionisio is attacked by bats and forced to participate in a black magic ritual involving a giant spider. This unusual emphasis on the paranormal adds an unsettling quality to this typical ‘closed circle’ setup, which features the usual group of mismatched protagonists isolated in a remote location and picked off by an unknown assassin, one at a time. These flourishes, coupled with the knowing opening (a highly typical Giallo kill revealed to be the film crew making a movie), promise much, which, unfortunately, the film fails to deliver.
Freda’s films nearly always looked visually striking due to his eye for shot composition and expertise with lighting. He also knew how to utilise his locations to their best advantage, drawing excellent contrasts between the natural beauty of these wooded grounds in the bright daylight and their more sinister aspects after dark, both being appropriate settings for dark and bloody deeds. The shadowed rooms and corridors of the old mansion also prove a highly effective backdrop to the early events, which score because they are a succession of odd, seemingly unconnected happenings in the wake of that pleasant fireside chat about the occult. At that stage, it’s unclear where all this is going, and the undercurrent of tension between the on-screen filmmakers adds a taste of incipient paranoia. These characters have a long history and share unspoken secrets, making their relationship dynamics genuinely intriguing. Sadly, none of that ultimately plays into the plot in any way, and it’s soon only too evident that they are all here just to fulfil the usual role of chewing up the run time before their fateful meetings with the killer.
However, disappointment really sets in once the plot starts to untangle, and everything becomes steadily more and more underwhelming as the body count rises. The final resolution borders on the banal, and it’s presented awkwardly with differing exposition from two separate characters. These attempted twists to the tale don’t feel earned; instead, grafted on to satisfy the usual Giallo convention of trying to wrongfoot the audience at the climax. The music is also an issue, with some solo piano cues crashing in at times with an ear-splitting volume. Instead of underlining the dramatic moments, they merely serve to distract from them and force home viewers to reach for the remote to turn it down. The murder scenes also disappoint, being brief and shot with little imagination. One, in particular, is delivered via a feeble SFX shot, which would probably have found a better home on the cutting room floor.
There are also some small niggles and inconsistencies in the story. Patrizi hasn’t seen his mother for a decade and a half and turns up at her home without calling ahead. Bringing his girlfriend along in such circumstances isn’t unreasonable, but inviting his friends to stay for the weekend? It’s not a problem as neither Strindberg nor Richardson seem put out about it. Yes, you could argue that the ‘catch-all’ solution to everything that happens excuses any such credibility lapses, but that doesn’t really cover it. Later, Patrizi’s strange and distant behaviour prompts a riverside confession to the group. Although he has no memory of it, as a boy, he killed his father with a knife to protect his mother from being beaten. After that, he grew up in a psychiatric facility before being released and finding fame as an actor. Now, these might be show folk and a bohemian bunch, but it’s still quite a stretch that no one even bats an eyelid over these revelations. Did they already know about it all? It’s unclear because we have no information about their prior relationship with him. Are they even really friends, or just colleagues who worked on a film together? It’s never made clear.
In terms of performance, this is Strindberg’s show. She plays her role with a conviction and skill that the material doesn’t justify and is particularly good in the scenes that hint that the mother-son relationship is borderline inappropriate. Patrizi has a much harder time of it with his character. As written, he’s a confused and bewildered soul who may just be a killer, so a lack of humour in his role is understandable. However, its total absence leaves our leading man with little personality, remote, one-dimensional and unlikeable. The picture people are predictably bitchy and self-absorbed too, and Dionisio can’t carry the entire emotional weight of the film in her somewhat stereotypical damsel in distress role. Richardson is also rather robotic, but, again, there’s no depth to his part, and he’s given little opportunity to act.
What’s left to fall back on is the sheer professionalism of Freda’s delivery and filmmaking technique. There are some truly wonderful moments here and there: the presentation of Patrizi’s idealised childhood with his mother via a stunning shot composition in white and purple, the perfectly orchestrated discussion about the occult by the fireside, the murder in the pastoral idyll by the river. Sadly, all his good work is compromised by the sloppy writing, for which he does have a co-credit. The most egregious example is the unexpected (but highly convenient) presence of a darkroom on the premises, which allows for the development of some very incriminating photographs but, of course, the immediate departure of the developer in question. There’s also an opening quote about humanity’s search for the devil from a 17th Century philosopher called ‘Hieronimus Steinback’. Please let me know if you run across any more of his profound insights on your journey through the universe.
Freda was born in Egypt in 1909, but his parents were Italian and, as a young man, he studied to be a sculptor in Milan. After beginning his film career as a screenwriter and an occasional editor and producer, he debuted as a director with the historical adventure film ‘Don Cesare di Bazan’ (1942). His four-decade career included many notable projects in cult and genre cinema, including Italy’s first post-war horror film, ‘I Vampiri/Lust of the Vampire’ (1956). He also created outstanding examples of several popular genres: the Peplum with ‘Maciste In Hell/Maciste all’inferno/The Witch’s Curse’ (1962), the gothic euro-horror with ‘The Horrible Dr Hitchcock/L’orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock’ (1962) and the Eurospy with ‘Coplan FX-18 Super Spy/Coplan FX 18 casse tout/The Exterminators’ (1965). However, his work on the Giallo was far less successful. ‘Double Face/A Doppia Faccia/Liz X Helen’ (1969) had its moments, but ‘The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire/L’iguana dalla lingua di fuoco’ (1971) was quite the dismal exercise.
Very well crafted, but an ultimately disappointing trip that sinks slowly into mediocrity.