michaelwotruba

Gathered in the great family villa for listening to the last will of a very rich owner of diamond mines that has just been killed, his relatives – that hate each other heartily – find that they have to spend a whole month in the vast estate, so that the pretenders to the legacy cut down from seven to three. While the various characters get busy scheming complex plans that bring the others one to eliminate reciprocally, an old Scotland Yard detective do his best to identify the perpetrator of the first crime that has set in motion the complex massacre game he's now witnessing. At the end truth will out; and the only inheritor will be the most unexpected. Interesting for its potential – and it's no accident that the story comes from the expert Ernesto Gastaldi ("Lo Strano Vizio Della Signora Wardh", 1971 by Sergio Martino) – it's a "giallo" that reveals its modesty in its continuous rolling up itself, leaving perplexed an audience who's probably waiting for the usual murder series that, in truth, never materializes. The death are, in fact, occasional and too much predictable to surprise even the ingenuous – still for few time – audiences of the premiere. Dorigo ("Assassino Senza Volto", 1968) isn't really a relevant figure in the Italian cinema history, but a modest artisan that worked in all the genres in fashion, without finding a real summit in his meager filmography; and also with this title he shows clumsy in creating the tension and few prone to action, building a sequence of scenes with dialogs – also because of the much theatrical implant of the screenplay by Sergio Bazzini ("Il Seme Dell'Uomo", 1970 by Marco Ferreri) and Roberto Natale ("Operazione Paura", 1966 by Mario Bava). The fair job by Aldo Tonti and Tonti ("Il Castello Dei Morti Vivi", 1965 by Lorenzo Sabatini, Michael Reeves and Luciano Ricci) some good characterizations – notably the ones by Mary Arden ("Kriminal", 1966 by Umberto Lenzi), Giovanna Galletti ("Gli Amori Di Ercole", 1960 by Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia), Franco Pesce ("Orgasmo", 1969 by Umberto Lenzi), Gilberto Mazzi ("Macario Contro Zagomar", 1944 by Giorgio Ferroni)and Sergio Ciani ("Maciste Contro Gli Uomini Della Luna", 1964 by Giacomo Gentilomo) – confer the minimum of availability to make pleasant the screening, always if you have no great expectations. Produced by Walter Brandi, who's got famous for some historical horror movies of Cinecittà, like "L'Ultima Preda Del Vampiro", 1960 by Piero Regnoli.

Two fair-minded girls come to Lampedusa, a little island just down Sicily, where they decide to seduce a nice local guy. Putting their plan into practice, they force the young guy to confront with some mind troubles the luxurious acting of his mother has generated into him. As a result, he gets cured from his mind blocks. Well acted by the American Hiram Keller and two of the most beautiful and gifted actresses of the Italian popular cinema of the Seventies (Ida Galli - "La coda dello scorpione", 1971 by Sergio Martino - and Antonia Santilli - Fernando Di Leo's excellent "Il boss", 1973), Savino's picture is an easy-watching picture, amusing and nice though remaining a honest commercial production.

Untidy story involving a doctor, his chronically depressed and very rich wife, her nymphomaniac twin sister and his secretary. In the end, after a much too complex intertwining of murdering sub-plots, the two sisters die. Alberto Cavallone (class of 1938), director of the far more brilliant "Blue movie" (1978) seems unable to catch again his charge of extreme, and neither his bizarre poetic vein; hence the movie remains a worthless as much as inconsistent work, with absolutely no point of interest and deeply boring. Moreover, the wooden actors are unable to improve the director, unable to believe the characters they should play. A major disappointment considering the director's previous titles.