Die Waffe, die Stunde, das Motiv

"The Weapon, The Hour and The mobile are the 3 most important things you need to know about a murder" say Renzo Montagnani. It's also the title of this classic giallo.

It's not a revolution of the genre but a classic expression of what a good suspenser must be. No crazy & wild camerawork but a genuine suspensful screenplay, with sharp dialogues & excellent, coherent and plausibles twists. Where directors such as Umberto Lenzi who rather play upon the incredible twists & turns a giallo is supposed to bring then on flashy camera angles, Francesco Mazzei choose the simple way.

Discreet yet precise camera work, less murders and actors than usual but a gloomy script revolving around a priest having two affairs at the same time with two women. When he decides to stop both, he gets killed in his church.

The cleverness of it all is in the way the script chooses to focus on the relationships between the characters than to elaborate murder after murder. The tensions between all of them are more visible than usual. At the same time, it also shows the private life of the detective investigating the case. Disenchanted but always professionnal, he gives some touch of humour which always hit the mark.

Some scenes ar quite surreal & nightmarish as when the nuns decide to expiate the crimes the priest committed before he died. They just whip their bare back with screaming preys til they faint. Just incredible. the other FX are very effective and the murders scenes look impressive : master Carlo Rambaldi (King Kong, ET) did it again.

The actors are all first rate : Renzo Montagnani proves he really can act, Eva Czemerys is always as magnetic & mysterious than in Giuseppe Bennatti's poor L'ASSASSINO HA RISERVATO NOVE POLTRONE and Bedy Moratti shows some incredible capacity to be both & strong at the same time in one single scene. Amazing actress.

L'arma, l'ora, il movente is a superior giallo in quality. Sleaze addicts & euroschlockers will be disappointed but movie buffs will certainly go for this very entertairning and chilling suspenser til the very end.

In "The Weapon,the Hour and the Motive" the murder victim is a priest.Father Giorgio is stabbed to death in his congregation church.Two police detectives Franco Boito and Moriconi investigate his murder.The main suspects are Giorgio's two lovers Giulia and Orchidea as he wanted to break up with both.There is also an orphaned boy who saw too much from his attic hideout and he will resolve the mystery.Overlooked Italian giallo stylishly made by Francesco Mazzei.There are some silly comedic moments and some effective shocks.The throat slashing scene is fairly graphic and there is a bit of nudity and sexual perversion.Mazzei is capable of building suspense pretty well too."The Weapon,the Hour and the Motive" deserves more recognition.7 out of 10.

It must be deliberate this the colour scheme in this film is so muted - everything's beige, brown or grey. Strange.

The story involves the murder of a Hip Priest. In fact, he's so hip he has not one but two lovers on the side. He's having a bit of a crisis about that though, judging by the way he self-flagellates in his church, of an evening. This is made even more disturbing by the unseen presence of a little kid whom the nuns have adopted.

The priest reckons that God might look down on him having it off with two ladies, so he breaks up with one of them (with the strange name of Orchidea) and tries to break it off with the other. I can't remember if he was successful because he ended up in the sack with her, before shortly getting stabbed to death by a mystery assailant. There's also a cute nun kicking about (the actress playing her is called Claudia Gravy - great second name! Looks like she's in Nun and the Devil too!)

Some rough looking copper turns up with a bumbling sidekick and they start obviously digging around to looks for clues. The copper also starts spending a lot time making goo-goo eyes at Orchidea, so quite a bit of the plot is devoted to that too. The most off-putting thing about this is that the actress who plays Orchidea is a dead-ringer for Italian actor Franco Rassell (only with hair), which makes all her upcoming nude scenes a bit disturbing.

Not quite so quirky as other Gialli, this one concentrates on the police investigation (before turning into a family drama near the end!), and if you're out for sleaze you do get to see the nuns taking a shower AND the whole bunch of them stripping to the waist and whipping themselves in honour of the dead priest.

It another well made film but will kind of get lost in the avalanche of more gory, pervier gialli released in 1972. I did have a good laugh at the punch up the copper had in a dark room, only for him to find out it was his sidekick, whom he then tells to feck off!

I liked this a lot. Bit of a confusing and strange start, a young boy in a room, a nurse with a hypodermic and all within a convent of singing nuns. And who is that guy on the motorbike getting in the way of the police? Oops, he is the police! I guess this just about qualifies as a giallo for while it doesn't have the stylish look or garish details, there are the sudden kills, the child always there mysteriously in the background, not to mention the cat and the bouncing marbles. Compelling and absorbing, this is well directed and we have to gradually piece things together as best we can to keep apace. And then there is the extraordinary scene where the priest flagellates himself for his guilt over his lovers, yes two of them. Oh and that is nothing to what we are treated to once the nuns decide to do the same - en mass! Good resolution always helps and so in summary a good yarn intelligently told and peppered with enough sex and violence to keep the most jaded giallo fan happy.

According Salvatore Puntillo the director Francesco Mazzei also was a producer, cutting any extra cost whenever it could boost the pre-arranged low budge, as we can state through the low-profile casting which didn't have any major star, in other hand the story is very exciting, where a trendy Priest (Maurizio Bonuglia) has been a sinful behavior on two heretic affairs with two different women, a married Orchidea Durantini (Bedi Moratti) and the fortune-teller Giulia Pisani (Eva Czemerys) ends up murdered inside the church witnessed by an orphaned boy.

Soon a Police Commissioner Franco Boito (Renzo Montagnani) starts investigate the weirdo case together with his sidekick Moriconi (Salvatore Puntillo) after several inquires at crime scene and all nuns hosted there, meanwhile Giulia appears dead with slashed throat, she was one of suspect, after an exhaustive work Commissioner Franco finally figures out that Orchidea's jealous husband ought be the main suspect, later he is found dead at your house apparently committed suicide, then closing the case, not so fast as usually a final twist comes.

The movie touches in a neuralgic matter about an unholy hidden affairs on church, exposing many auto-flagellation upon a whip, such scourge was routinely used to by Priest and Nuns to purge wicked throughs, many nudity scenes were scattered along the picture as well, fine Giallo with a modest casting, nevertheless not devoid of interest.

Thanks for reading.

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First watch: 2024 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 7.