A British mystery thriller featuring Suzi Kendall. The more I see of Suzi the more I like her acting and her style. This is by no stretch a great movie. It’s hardly even a good movie but there’s a certain charm to it. For one, is bright and colorful. Not in a Bava lighting sense, but an overall color palette that permeates every frame. Second, the soundtrack is truly awful to the point of wrapping around and becoming ironically funny. It’s like something you’d hear in a 70s television drama. And then there’s the ridiculous plotting. An art teacher thinks she sees Satan killing a teenage girl and she paints Satan in hopes of luring out the killer. Britain is weird. That’s all I have to say.

On the surface, this a horror movie about a small mountain town that has been plagued with a number of murders of which many of the locals are beginning to suspect there might be a werewolf involved. But horror takes a backseat to the story of a recovering alcoholic policeman who is desperately trying to emerge from his father’s shadow and prove that he can actually accomplish something in the world besides his drunken fits of rage. Overall there is an underlying comedic tone to the grim goings on. The horror elements feel like they are happening in the background and it isn’t until the end that you realize that it has all been a carefully crafted and subtle build up of clues leading to the final climax. So subtle, that a Agatha Christie style wrap-up may have helped ring the right bells at the end. The point is moot because I would gladly re-watch this in a heartbeat.

The two big positives of this giallo are: a creepy, abstract Morricone score and lots of wonderfully composed shots featuring various modern/brutalist architecture backdrops. One of these days I need to see that hotel spiral staircase in person (also seen in Dr. Goldfoot and a few other 70s Italian films).

I mostly found the story to be lacking in suspense or even just a basic sense of mystery and intrigue. It think most of this had to do with underdeveloped supporting characters and confusing/bad/unfocused editing. There a scene where a paraplegic woman is stalked by a killer except that they never establish that a killer is actually stalking her. It just becomes woman crawling on the ground for five minutes.

Italian Gothic horror from 1964 featuring Barbara Steele. Shot in glorious black & white, I was ready to give up on this one but the finale makes up for the non-sensical plotting of the first 2/3rds of the movie.

1957 noir film about a gangster who organizes a heist of drugs from a ship at sea. The movie opens with the heist taking place perfectly—complete with cheesy narration. This is soon revealed to be a sales pitch film that was created to get backing from the mob. The rest of the film sees the real crew being assembled and, whaddya know, they’re all incompetent. I guess the movie was okay, but all the scenes just seem drag out. Even the final chase is goes on forever and nothing happens.