La morte scende leggera

From the same director and indeed the same year as the similarly hard to categorise, Byleth comes this strangely hypnotic blend of thriller cum ghost story cum giallo. I have seen this categorically denied as a giallo and yet I beg to differ. There are many a wide eyed moment, plenty of kills amid the sex and more than a hint that someone may be going mad. In addition there is an absolutely wonderful nod to Bird With a Crystal Plumage, and this scene with the locked glass doors probably ranks as the film's best. There is also, in this movie set within a hotel a scene most reminiscent of The Shining, though this might well have inspired the writer Stephen King, rather than Kubrick. Well worth a watch, if you can find it.

Ultra-obscure giallo involving a man in a lot of trouble. He returns home one night after working away to find that his wife has been murdered. Due to the nature of his job, he does not go to the police but instead goes to his lawyer, who arranges for him to be set up in an abandoned hotel while they try and establish an alibi.

You see, our man here is a drug courier and has no alibi because he was up to no good, stayed well out of the road of people, and cannot rely on anyone to say he was out of town when his wife was killed because his associates cannot reveal themselves. The lawyer knows this as he's just as corrupt as anyone else, and has to find out who really killed the guy's wife, although I didn't really work out why they kept the guy alive instead of just shooting him.

So, the guy ends up locked in an abandoned hotel with his mistress and at first it's all 'hey, let's watch a porno and get it on' but soon they are bickering and fighting with each other. Things go from bad to worse when it turns out that someone else is in the hotel with them, then things goes completely off the deep end when someone gets murdered in the hotel and our poor guy has to help dispose of the body! What's going on then?

At first it seems like we're in for a very long, boring film with two people trapped in a hotel arguing and having flashbacks but soon things get very surreal with even our poor guying shouting "What's happened to reality?" while a strange sexy lady has a bath in a bare room while a monkey plays on a perch in the background, loud parties reveal themselves to be recordings, and weird hippy types outside spout absolute nonsense that I guess is supposed to be some sort of comment on the state of Italy in the early seventies.

Also strange is that we often get to hear people's thoughts. Not just the protagonist, but everyone, and usually it's some bizarre comment on someone they've just met. You'll be scratching your head so much you'll have a groove in it by the time things are explained so absurdly you'd think they were just making the thing up as they went along.

Yet it's for these very reasons that this one is worth tracking down. There's little nudity and blood, but enough daftness to keep you going. Good lighting effects too - in a hotel where there's seemingly no electricity, you still get to see what's going on, which can sometimes be the downfall of any horror film.

June 2024

I am a huge giallo fan and try to watch any films that have any chance of being a giallo, and i was lucky enough to just stumble across this one, i had never heard of "Death falls lightly" before, which is its English title.

It started off promisingly and like a proper giallo, but unfortuanately the longer it went on the more disappointing it got and started to get a bit weird and dreamlike. I will class it as a giallo, but i would say only an average one. Truthfully very little really happens.

One positive is several actors can be recognised from these type of films, even if you dont know their names, one of them being Tom Felleghy who pops up in just about every giallo ever made and has quite a big role in this one.

I am not recommending it but if you are a giallo fan like me then you will want to watch it.

An average 6 out of 10.

This is a pretty slow going thriller which is absolutely not a giallo. The story is very boring and there is absolutely no gore no black glove killer. The plot is absurd and unengaged and sometimes stupid. I am a giallo fan who watch 70 giallos total, some good , some bad, but this is maybe the worst so called giallo I have ever seen(I still doubt it is a giallo) I am sincerely suggest all euro shock and giallo fans there is no need to track this trash down, believe me it is not worth it, you could save 75 minus of your life. This film definitely not a good example of my favorite genre-giallo. 1 star because no lower grade at IMDb.

Death Falls Lightly is a Giallo of the ultra rare variety, and while it has nothing on the best of what the genre has to offer; Leopoldo Savona's film is still a very solid genre entry. The film takes on an almost dreamlike atmosphere and presents a very isolated and focused mystery inside a deserted hotel building. Director Leopoldo Savona, who made Byleth also in 1972, was clearly hampered by a low budget which comes through in the overall 'cheap' atmosphere of the film, but he triumphs over this well with his story and characters. Our main character is a man named Giorgio Darica; a criminal who finds himself in a tight spot when someone murders his wife and he doesn't have an alibi. His lawyer suggests that he hides out in an abandoned hotel, and he takes his mistress with him. At first the pair is happy to make good use of their surroundings by having as much sex as possible; but pretty soon the tension starts to mount between them and things get worse when George stumbles upon a woman with her throat cut and begins to believe he may be going insane.

The main location in the film is the hotel, and while the director succeeds in making it feel very small and isolated; it has to be said that it's not the most exciting place for a film to take place in. However, this is made up for by the characters and the situation which is always at the forefront and the director does not concern himself too much with things going on outside of the central point of the film. Unfortunately this does mean that the murder scenes suffer - there are a few, but they're practically bloodless and not what I've come to expect from a Giallo. However, while there was ample opportunity for plenty of sex; thankfully the film doesn't just turn into a soft-core porno, and that's to its credit. The soundtrack is interesting and really not bad at all. Parts feel like they've been pulled from Spaghetti Westerns while the main theme is a cheap seventies rock track; but it does at least go with the film. The ending is really quite good and the film gives a good twist on what is probably the most clichéd ending you can get. Overall, Death Falls Lightly is likely to remain in obscurity; but it's worth tracking down and I do recommend it.