Perché si uccidono (La merde)

Due to my strange, recent infatuation with pretty 70's Italian exploitation actress Leanora Fani, I have now seen a number of pretty good ("Nene") and pretty weird ("Beastialita", "Sensativa") low-budget Italian obscurities featuring this lissome Latin lovely. This movie definitely falls into the latter category, although it's not just "pretty" weird. Maurice Ronet ("The Seduction") is middle-aged guy with a beautiful wife and a young daughter, but he is indebted to his employer, a wealthy industrialist who saved his life during the war. His employer asks him to look after his troubled adult son. The son is definitely troubled--he considers his recently married sister to be a "bourgeois hypocrite" after he apparently follows her to satanic mass/sex orgy one night! He also has a communist girlfriend (Fani), who is apparently hooked on heroin, and gets him tangled up with s creepy drug dealer named "Judas" (who he FIRST met at the aforementioned satanic orgy). Confused yet? Good, because then the whole thing REALLY gets weird.

Euro-beauty Beba Loncar is listed most prominently in the credits, but she has a pretty insubstantial role as Ronet's long-suffering wife. Fani also has a relatively small but very important role (and she gets naked, of course). The two male leads have by far the biggest parts with a memorable turn from the creepy guy who plays "Judas". The visual style owes a lot late 60's/early 70's psychedelic "head" movies--the young protagonist has several very bizarre drugged-induced hallucinations (as typical in these drug movies, the filmmakers seem to have kind of confused addictive drugs like heroin with psychedelic drugs like LSD). The satanic mass may or may not be a hallucination, but regardless it's almost certainly a nod to "The Exorcist" and "Rosemary's Baby". And if there's one thing I enjoy even more than another undraped performance from the luscious La Fani, it's another cut-rate European rip-off of these satanic classics. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to normal people, of course, but I'm not worried anyone "normal" is ever going to be reading this. . .

The supposed English title of this movie, "Percy is Dead", should make anyone even halfway familiar with Italian smile. There is no one named "Percy" in this movie.

I watched Percy Is Killed for the actress Leonora Fani, who was gorgeous in Fear Hotel and Kyra. Here, she has a supporting role playing a drug addict, hooked on the needle by the main character. True to her role, the actress looks like she has not bathed in a week. Although she does take off her clothes, the sight is not one meant to inspire eroticism.

The main plot has a rich loser forsaking his bourgeoisie upbringing, his wife, and his child for dope. The loser falls in with some mean addicts, led by Luciano Rossi, that blonde twitchy guy who frequently appears in Eurotrash movies (Death Smiles on a Murderer, Death Walks at Midnight). Percy Is Killed is a slow, obvious story headed by a lead character who is nearly impossible to empathize with. A few oddball hallucination scenes offer mild distraction. By the way, what is the meaning of the nude black man playing a trumpet? Do junkies actually see things like that?