So schön - so nackt - so tot

I'm not sure I've ever seen this and had got a blu-ray of Code Red from the US and was pleased that I got it. It is not brilliant but rather good and the dead girls are very naked for their killings. And rather nasty knifings they are, the killer is certainly in the classic style with black coat, big hat and of course black leather gloves. Roberto Bianchi Montero made many different films but I think this was his only giallo and was 65 at the time. Farley Granger is impressive and the girls lovely especially Sylva Koschina and I always love to see Nieves Navarro (Susan Scott). It was an interesting idea that the naughty girls get it and the end is really good as we get to see Farley looking on!

Someone is the classic giallo uniform (hat, gloves, raincoat, stocking over the face) is murdering the adulterous wives of the upper classes and leaving pictures of their crimes at the scene. Try not to focus on the men in this situation getting off without punishment - just go with the flow.

A moustachioed Farley Granger is on the case, which quickly becomes a serial killer case when another unfaithful woman is stalked, in slow motion, on a beach, then slashed to death. Farley finds pictures scattered about that crime scene too, although the offending male always has his face scored out. Who could be putting paid to the pampered people of the pompous populace?

So everyone that's rich is knocking boots with each other, we find out as all the surviving ladies have a naked massage thing going on. Silvano Trinquili is having it off with his neighbour, whose husband is crippled, and when she's murdered, her husband stupidly falls down a flight of stairs and dies, which may be the most pointless random death in a giallo I've watched to date.

Oh, and there's the obvious red herring. Played of course by Luciano Rossi, this red herring is the guy who prepares the corpses - he loves running his hands over them and speaking to them and tells the policeman that they are at the most beautiful in this state. I think the character's name was Reddo Herringi.

Although it is packed full of naked women, the plot kind of plods along bumping off people here and there. The ending is a cracker however - one of those out of nowhere endings you get in Italian cinema (see Black Turin for another one I didn't see coming). This is one of those gialli that you'll get to once you've watched the more interesting ones.

One of the things I like in the gialli is their mixture of sex and crime - you can have your thrills and watch at the same time beautiful women with scanty or no dress at all being pursued and killed - their eyes bulge in terror, they scream, their beautiful arms try to defend themselves and finally they lie still .... so sweet... so dead! Very politically incorrect, I know! But we can't deny that we all have our darker side - personally, in real life, I don't like violence, but in my imagination many things can happen - I can even fly!

Other attractive thing in the gialli is their sense of improvisation - as they are made mainly on a low budget, many times, friends and relatives are called to act in minor roles, or to work in the crew. This is why "So sweet, so dead" (Rivelazioni di un....) transmits a feeling of spontaneity. Scenes like a party in a house, friends playing volleyball etc. feel natural. There are also some comic touches added here and there and Luciano Rossi gives us his usual dose of weird humor. Women are getting undressed most of the time, and some, as soon as they undress, get killed. I think you already know the plot: A serial killer is murdering all the unfaithful wives in a well-to-do circle.

The final scene is somewhat shocking! It seems to condone the killer's feelings, if not his actions. If you take the film seriously, you won't like it. Take the film as it is, with its fast and active camera work, lots of female flesh and thrills, and you can't go wrong.

Accuse the film of misogynistic or of whatever you want. Explain me just one thing: Why is it that beautiful women from all over the world went to Italy to get barbarically killed in the gialli? Just answer me that. Enjoy!

The rap on this giallo is that it is especially moralistic and misogynistic; however,I found the first charge to be untrue and the other greatly exaggerated. A crazed killer is murdering unfaithful wives and leaving photographic evidence of their dalliances next to the bodies. This certainly SEEMS pretty moralistic. But the betrayed husbands don't come off any more sympathetically than the wives. Many knew about their wives' infidelities and/or were playing around themselves (one husband of a murder victim is himself having an affair with another murder victim). Moreover, the killer doesn't turn out to be motivated by vengeance. He is killing these women because he can get away with it, because their high society husbands will thwart the investigation of the beleaguered inspector(Farley Granger) at every turn lest they themselves be publicly exposed as cuckolds! This kind of deep cynicism is typical of later period gialli and Italian poliziani films, but there's nothing especially moralistic about it. Viewed in this way, even the final actions of the detective, which are certainly appalling and take away the only remaining likable and sympathetic character in the movie, are clearly more a final act of despairing cynicism than of righteous anger.

As for the misogyny charge, the raison d'etre of this movie seems to be to show a lot of attractive European actresses (Silva Koscina, Femi Benussi, Annabella Incontrerra, Nieves Navarro, Krista Nell) in various states of undress, and the filmmakers don't seem to care too much whether these women are alive, dead, or dying at the time. The movie lacks the flair, the garish delerium, and the stylized violence of better gialli, but it's not really all that different in it's attitude toward women--they're a decorative canvas for a painting of depravity and brutality. But just because the painting isn't very good doesn't make this film any more or less morally reprehensible than other gialli. In fact, the only really sympathetic character in the whole movie is the college-age daughter (Angela Covello) of one of the murder victims, who hilariously admonishes her boyfriend's "bourgeois politics" while he fumbles with the buttons on her blouse. The incompetent filmmakers, however, inexplicably drop this potential heroine halfway through. An appealing female protagonist would have done a lot to mitigate the lingering misogyny, but here this movie once again suffers from its own incompetence.

I love this movie. The first time that I saw it was when I was a little girl, around 9 or 10 years old. The storyline is great: a killer who targets women who have been unfaithful to their husbands. It is unfair that the killer does not target unfaithful men, but hey, this is a giallo after all. It's funny because I am pretty sure that I only like this movie because I watch it in Italian, and that makes it exotic to me. If it were an American movie, I would probably not like it as much. Farley Granger is quite handsome, even more so than in "Strangers On A Train". There is a red herring that I found predictable, but I've been watching horror films for most of my life, so I often guess correctly what's going on. I knew who the killer really was long before it was revealed. I found the ending quite sad though. It would have been nice to have a different outcome. At least this giallo doesn't have the graphic violence that some of it's contemporaries have.