(1974)
Dir - Stelvio Massi
Overall: MEH
The third full-length from cinematographer-turned director Stelvio Massi, Five Women for the Killer, (5 donne per l'assassino), understandably has some inventive camerawork, but it follows the giallo framework in an unremarkable manner. This comes down to the screenplay by Jacques Barclay, Gianfranco Clerici, and Roberto Gianviti which concerns the bog-standard, black-gloved killer who makes phone calls without saying anything and this time slices up women that are pregnant. The structure is relentlessly dull as we follow around too many unnecessary secondary characters, find out one of them is with child, and then said victim gets predictably knocked-off shortly thereafter. In between these sporadic kills, the police sit down and interview the same people over and over again and J&B bottles are in full display virtually everywhere. Three women on screen sport reddish hair and look exactly the same and at least twenty minutes could have been cut from the run time to streamline things as Francis Matthews' protagonist takes a backseat at regular intervals. The killer reveal is as easily foreseeable as all of the switch-blade slashing murders, but Massi and fellow director of photography Sergio Rubini do stage some adequate shots and atmosphere here or there.
(1975)
Dir - Tano Cimarosa
Overall: WOOF
Tough guy character actor Tano Cimarosa took his first of only three cracks at directing with Reflections in Black, (Il vizio ha le calze nere, Vice Wears Black Hose); a giallo that is easily in the top running as one of the most unnecessary and boring ever made. Redundant to the point of parody, Adriano Bolzoni and Luigi Latini de Marchi's script makes sure to put in the switch-blade-using/cross-dressing/black-gloved murderer, a flaming homosexual, sinister phone calls, endlessly monotonous banter between police inspectors, soft-focus sex scenes, and an expository dialog dump at the end to explain the killer's disturbed motivation. There is also a repetitive musical score as decreed by Italian law apparently to be in all giallos and the entire structure is so hack-laden as to be borderline insulting. This is further unforgiving due to Cimarosa's noticeably inept directing style which is nothing more than "point the camera at the actors until they've finished saying all of their lines". Never once is any sense of momentum made paramount and it is visually ugly at worst and merely inconsequentially dull at best. Cimarosa seems to be the only one slightly enjoying himself on screen as a gruff detective, since almost all of the other performers come off as if they are just as uninterested as the viewer is. Even with the spicy detail of all of the murder victims being women who engage in lesbian affairs, (which in this universe is every woman shown on screen), the end result could not be more lifeless.
(1977)
Dir - Filippo Walter Ratti
Overall: MEH
A giallo by-way-of Agatha Christie mystery, Crazy Desires of a Murderer, (I vizi morbosi di una governante, Morbid Vices of a Housekeeper), has copious amounts of nudity, detailed taxidermy, and eyes getting cut out of people's already dead faces, but it is still a mundane watch. The last film to be directed by Filippo Walter Ratti and scripted by frequent Emmanuel screenwriter Ambrogio Molteni, it uses the ole gag of a bunch of hip young people having a weekend shindig at an isolated mansion, this one belonging to one of the gang whose father is a wheelchair-bound curmudgeon that likes Chinese art. People sit around a talk, dance while buzzed on Jim Bean, take their clothes off and fornicate with each other, and then one of them gets murdered in their sleep which brings in Corrado Gaipa's overweight and limping, yet crafty police inspector to hang out there until discovering the culprit. Of course it ends up being a poorly thought-out, elaborate scheme on the bad guy's part that is further exploitative in nature for involving a dim-witted young boy who is locked away after killing a guy that was banging his now dead mother, (long story there), but the presentation is too sterile to enjoy. The actors all seem bored as Gaipa has endless conversations with them and says that he knows that they are all hiding something several dozen times, but for Euro-trash fans who do not mind boring, flattly-shot sex scenes one after the other, this may be passable.
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