La ragazza di Cortina

Another disappointing Italian thriller of the 1990s, even if it does boast involvement from some of the guys working at the top of their game in the 1970s. This one feels like a very low budget rip-off of SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY, with an abused wife faking her own death and fleeing her artist husband only to get involved with a sleazy couple with ulterior motives. It's not very well acted or even competently directed, instead feeling rather tawdry and with more focus on flesh than suspense or real danger.

The marketing calls this stinker a "giallo" but like hundreds of other Italian movies it is just a poorly done film conveniently thrown into that phony pigeonhole. I wish latter-day film fans (younger than me, who actually attended Italian movies religiously in the late '60s and throughout the '70s) would realize that these individual films were not made as a genre, but merely lumped together in retrospect by some misguided know-it-all fake historians. Try some independent thinking out there!

It doesn't take much thinking to dislike GIRL FROM CORTINA, as this clumsily directed, would-be thriller just lies there. Sure, Vanessa Gravina is vapidly pretty as the heroine, who changes her hair color and hair style in order to escape an abusive painter husband and start a new life.

She fakes her death by motorcar accident off a cliff, and the film heads downward from there, as surely as the vehicle plunges towards the Gothic waves-crashing-on-rocks below, set on the Greek island of Hydra.

There are several shaggy-dog reels of her almost romancing a kindly guy back in her home town of Cortina. A dubious swinger couple who she meets naked in a sauna (!) provide some phony suspense and troilism to kill off the boring center reels, but this nonsensical movie completely falls apart when gal pal Isabel Russinova (think of Lena Olin without any talent) plots to kill Vanessa's hubby, who's conveniently tracked her down and is back to his old tricks of slapping her silly.

Quicker than you can say CLOUZOT! the untalented director Maurizio Vanni is trotting out a lame variation on the master's 1955 classic DIABOLIQUE. It's by-the-numbers imitation, with plot details transparently phony -sort of Diabolique for the mentally-impaired. I've seen many, many riffs on the original, from Curtis Harrington's splendid TV version (GAMES with James Caan) to the misguided though well-cast Hollywood remake featuring Sharon Stone & Isabelle Adjani, but there's not even a smidgen of quality here. And to make matters worse, when he's not stealing from DIABOLIQUE, Vanni throws in gimmicks dating back to an equally classic movie, GASLIGHT.

Acting is miserable throughout, ranging from the Todd Slaughter-level hamminess of the villainous husband, to the nice one scene/disgusting the next antics of Russinova and her boy friend. Instead of exciting, the final reel is very boring, and features (comically for me) rhythmic music straight out of a 1992 Sarah Young/Sean Michaels porn video!

This is 1994 Italian giallo, made at a time when the genre was in serious decline and the once-vaunted Italian film industry had fallen into a state of almost total collapse. Nevertheless, two of the few decent gialli from this era, "Craving Desires" and "Smile of the Fox", both had the creative fingerprints of the Martino brothers, director Sergio and producer Luciano, on them, as this one does as well. The Martino brothers had really pioneered the gialli back in the late 60's/early 70's, and while their 90's films were a pale shadow of their earlier films, I took their names on this one (albeit only as producers) as a reason for cautious optimism.

This does have some strengths. It is filmed partly on a scenic Greek island, but mostly in the scenic Italian mountain town of Cortina (also the setting of several Bond movies and the original "The Pink Panther"). The female lead Vanessa Gravina is no Edwige Fenech (but Edwige Fenech probably wouldn't have been Edwige Fenech either is she'd had to begin her career in the 1990's), still Gravina is generally an asset to the production, very pretty and with a nice natural body. The movie is well-photographed and edited and, unlike a lot of 90's gialli, resists the temptation to simply degenerate into a glossy softcore porn flick. It doesn't bother me the movie liberally borrows elements from classic European and Hollywood films like "Diabolique" and "Gaslight" (it certainly wasn't the only gialli to mine those sources), but it did bother me that the initial plot twist--an abused woman faking her own death to escape her abusive and obsessed artist husband--seems to be borrowed from the then-recent Julia Robert's stinker "Sleeping with the Enemy".

The real problem with this though is that while the first two thirds are somewhat intriguing, it simply runs out of gas after that, and the end is especially weak. Compared to some of the other tedious softcore swill passing itself off as "gialli" in this era, this isn't that bad, but it's definitely not in the class of the two 90's efforts Sergio Martino actually directed (the aforementioned "Craving Desires" and "Smile of the Fox") and it certainly isn't a spot on the original 60's and 70's giallo genre.