I vizi morbosi di una governante

Countess Ileana De Chablais (Isabelle Marchall) invites her swinging pals to her father's castle to get tipsy on expensive champagne and play sexy charades. When one of the young women, Elsa (Patrizia Gori), turns up stabbed to death and minus her eyeballs, a police inspector (Corrado Gaipa) tries to unravel the mystery and identify the killer, the many suspects including scoundrel Pier-Luigi (in trouble with the local mafia), Ileana's insane secret half-brother Leandro (a dab hand at taxidermy), a creepy uncle, and stern housekeeper Berta (Annie Carol Edel).

Part gothic horror and part giallo, Crazy Desires of a Murderer fails thanks to a muddled, meandering plot and a set of characters that it's difficult to care about. The film also includes subplots about heroin smuggling and the theft of a valuable emerald necklace, but it's all so confusing that trying to keep track of what's going on isn't worth the headache. Director Filippo Walter Ratti tries to compensate with a couple of bloody deaths and a fair amount of nudity from some attractive young women (with Berta actually proving to be quite the hottie), but the whole thing is so slapdash that it is hard to remain invested for the duration. By the time the identity of the killer is revealed, you'll have long given up caring.

N.B. Pier-Luigi moulding a candle into a phallus while gorgeous brunette Gretel (Adler Gray) lies naked on a bed suggests that there might have been a 'sexier' version available at some point.

It's a rather silly idea but it just about holds together with several lovely girls stripping off while somebody is killing and taking out their eyes. It is a rather nasty and bloody business but doesn't really get what is happening. There are a lot of footsteps and people going down to the cellar although it is the inspector who is trying to find out what is going on and he seems to have an amusing time.

I am not kidding, I had this movie for almost two decades and I began watching it at least five times but the first 20 minutes or so never really caught my interest enough to keep watching for some reason. Now, finally I watched it to the end and can conclude that if you get past the opening 25-30 minutes you are in for a quite entertaining and good looking little giallo with quite some eerie atmosphere. Corrado Gaipa is the most memorable in the role of the inspector, along with Isabelle Marchall as the young countess. The opening and ending theme, which I believe is by Piero Piccioni (he is the credited composer here) is an incredibly atmospheric piece, but the rest of the soundtrack is a mystery to me. I hear themes from at least two other earlier giallo movies not scored by Piccioni. It would be nice to see these themes accurately credited.

Pros: Better than average script for this type of movie. There are some interesting subplots. Some of the locations are nice. I really liked the music - it's simple but effective!

Cons: Poor direction. No style. The shots waste locations. The acting is pretty bad across the board. The inspector comes across as the best of the bunch, but he can't carry the whole movie. There is a bunch of gratuitous bad sex scenes. I've been more turned on watching paint dry. Also, it takes awhile to get to the first murder.

Overall: It's a low budget mess created by a director who can't direct a bunch of actors who can't act.

This may seem like a very bizarre and silly statement, but bear with me. If the Giallo sub-genre is one big and joyful family, then "Crazy Desires of a Murderer" would be the weird and creepy uncle! He's unreliable and always involved in some sort of trouble, but his stories and lifestyle are utterly fascinating. Nobody openly appreciates his perverted remarks or his twisted sense of humor, but secretly everybody loves him just a little bit. And, finally, the family party or reunion simply isn't complete without him.

What I basically mean with the above gibberish is that "Crazy Desires of a Murderer" is a very atypical and experimental Giallo, but nevertheless one that keeps you intrigued and amused even though the overall sentiment at the end is disappointment. Arriving quite late at the party (the giallo's heyday ended around 1974-1975; while this was released in 1977), the script incorporates various other non-giallo styles, genres, and story elements.

The rudimentary plot of a spoiled rich girl and her eccentric friends being stalked by a sadist killer is pure and unhinged Giallo, obviously, but the setting at the remote old family castle with its mandatorily sinister inhabitants (a crippled patriarch, a spooky amateur-taxidermist son, a cold-blooded housemaid...) also makes the film an authentic gothic-horror effort. There's also a crime/thriller angle, since one of the guests at the castle is up to his neck into drug-smuggling and plans the theft of a valuable family jewel. As soon as the police inspector enters the scene, played by the eminent Corrado Gaipa, "Crazy Desires..." even almost turns into an Agatha Christie novel, since he's a sort of Poirot who draws all the attention to him and sets traps for the potential culprits. Last but not least, the film also shares the contemporary Italian fetish for eyeball-violence. There's a regrettably low number of kills in this film, especially considering the expanded cast, but the poor girl who gets it first suffers tremendously as her eyes are literally spooned out of the sockets and put in a bag.

As said, a very strange flick full of gratuitous sex and shocks, but also one that is ultimately unsatisfying. Director Filipo Walter Ratti has enough material here to fill at least two full-length movies, but stuffing everything into one script made it hectic and unnatural.