‘How come there’s so much embalming fluid in the house?’
Five friends accompany a wealthy heiress to her father’s castle for a weekend stay. On the first night, one of them is stabbed and killed, and the detective is faced with a house filled with suspects but no apparent motive…
Anonymous Giallo murder mystery from director Filippo Walter Ratti and writer Ambrogio Molteni. Corrado Gaipa tries to catch a killer while Isabelle Marchall and Claudio Peticchio are among the beautiful people trying to avoid an early bath.
he elderly Baron De Chablais (Stuart Brisbane Colin) is content with his life amongst his Oriental Art collection, but the one thorn in his side is his socialite daughter, Ileana (Marchall). Returning from her latest trip to exotic climes, she brings five friends with her to spend the weekend at the family castle. However, her choice of companions leaves a little to be desired. Without her knowledge, boyfriend Pierluigi La Rocca (Peticchio) has been using her to smuggle drugs into the country with the assistance of embassy official Bobby Jelson (Gaetano Russo). The other man in the group is young doctor and psychologist Frank Hoffman (Giuseppe Colombo), who had an affair with the castle’s housekeeper, Berta (Annie Carol Edel), two years earlier and tricked her out of her life savings. The group is rounded out by the nervous Gretel Schanz (Adler Gray) and spoilt heiress Elsa Leiter (Patrizia Gori).
The group settle in for a typical weekend’s fun of drink, party games and casual sex. Gori and Colombo are secretly involved, but they argue after Gori provokes him with her jealousy. It’s just an act, however, and a way of clearing the decks for the late-night arrival of Peticchio. Meanwhile, his nominal girlfriend Marchall has been roofied by slime ball Russo, and housekeeper Edel has drugged family secret Leandro (Roberto Zattini) for use as her own private sex toy. In the morning, Gori is found dead in her room with her eyes removed, and Baron Colin is comatose after a heart attack induced by witnessing the killer leaving the scene of the crime. The Police Inspector (Gaipa) has quite a problem to unravel as he tries to identify the culprit. Suspicion naturally falls on Zattini, who lives in the cellar. As a child, he was traumatised by seeing his mother kill the family gardener, who was attempting to assault her. He’s spent the intervening years in and out of private clinics and has not spoken a word since the incident.
By 1977, the Giallo craze was all but over. There were still a handful of productions qualifying for the label that hit theatres each year, but they were a rarity. Finding an example so formulaic, lacking in ambition and creativity at such a late date is quite a surprise. Until you discover that the film was shot in 1973 and had been sitting on a shelf somewhere for four years before going to general release. Apparently, this was due to financial difficulties at the production company. However, you could be forgiven for assuming that the delay was due to the quality of the finished article. This film is an entirely anonymous effort, stirring together familiar, half-baked ingredients into an underwhelming thriller that fails to surprise, engage or entertain on almost any level. It’s not a terrible film per se, but it is one that will begin to pass from the memory almost immediately after the final fadeout.
The ‘closed circle’ mystery, initially popularised by Agatha Christie, is a hard plot to fumble. On the other hand, it’s so familiar to audiences now that putting a new spin on it is quite a challenge. Here, the setup is pretty typical: an isolated location, a group of suspects, secret relationships, unknown motives and the cast of characters dropping dead one at a time. Certain basics are essential in order to pull off such an enterprise. The plot has to be neat and tidy, with clues and red herrings liberally scattered along the way. Crucially, there also needs to be a focus, a central thread or main characters that pull the audience into the mystery and out the other side. Unfortunately, Ratti’s film does not have either, and, as a result, it feels endlessly cluttered and muddled. It’s almost like watching a film comprised entirely of subplots that are only loosely connected.
Italian films, particularly in the late 1960s, liked to mock the idle rich, and this bled into many of the Giallo thrillers of the following decade. So here we get plenty of faithless bed-hopping intrigue and associated shenanigans among the beautiful young people. However, none of it really plays into the mystery, and all of it is clearly just an excuse for some nudity and sex scenes. It also fills up a good deal of the first half hour, with the film approaching the halfway point by the time the first victim ends up on the wrong end of the killer’s blade. There’s also the drug dealing, which sees Peticchio given only 48 hours to clear his debt to the local crime boss or face the consequences. There’s Zattini in the cellar practising his taxidermic activities with small animals (never a good sign!), the fact that the late Baroness was buried in the grounds with a priceless emerald and that Colombo was apparently involved with embalming her body after she died. Don’t morticians usually take care of that sort of thing?
Rather than make for an intriguingly complex mystery, these elements come over as excuses to fill some time, which would be fine if there was a central plot thread to follow as well. But there isn’t. Focusing on Gaipa’s investigation would probably have been the best option, especially given that the veteran character actor gives the best performance. But, instead, Ratti flits around from one half-realised story piece to another. There are also a couple of very odd stylistic choices. Early on, Marchall and Gori are shown stretched out on a fireside rug, kissing and fondling each other. Ratti then zooms out to show everyone watching. It’s a game of movie charades. It’s one of the few clever moments in a film with so few, but it’s followed immediately by Colombo and Gray taking each other’s clothes off. They are shown in silhouette, with the film speeded up and accompanied by silent movie comedy music. Apparently, this charade represents ‘A Clockwork Orange’!
There’s very little else to highlight here, with none of the technical aspects noteworthy in any way either. The castle interiors look like the inside of any big house, and the landscape outside is nothing special. There is some opportunity to build atmosphere with the sequences shot in the tunnels beneath the castle. However, it’s squandered with a flat and lifeless presentation and a technique reminiscent of 1970s movies made for television. The murder scenes are brief and not very well executed, and there’s far more gore in the scenes of Zattini pursuing his slightly gruesome hobby. Ratti doesn’t even use the setting of his taxidermy workshop and its stuffed occupants to any significant advantage. Aside from Gaipa, there’s nothing memorable about any of the acting, although some mitigation must be made on behalf of the cast. The script gives them very little to work with.
This was the final film of Ratti’s directorial career, which began just after the Second World War with the obscure crime drama ‘Felicità Perduta’ (1946). Few of his finished projects made it beyond the shores of his native Italy. Still, his early film ‘Eleonora Duse’ (1947) did feature a young Rossano Brazzi, who later found international fame in films like ‘South Pacific’ (1958) and ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’ (1962). He also worked with Cesare Danova, who later became a familiar face on US Network Television and appeared in Martin Scorsese’s ‘Mean Streets’ (1973). The Eurospy craze of the 1960s saw him gain rare international distribution for ‘Operation White Shark/A.D.3 operazione squalo bianco’ (1966), but it was a dismal effort and probably did little for his career. Sleazy horror ‘Night of the Damned/La notte dei dannati/Night of the Sexual Demons’ (1971) made it to the Cannes Film Festival and was released in a couple of European territories. It also reached the high street shelves of the international video market during the heyday of home rental.
Probably rushed, certainly uninspired and the tiniest footnote in the history of the Giallo.