A handsome young man (Lino Cappolichino) is traumatized by the death of his mother when he was young boy. His successful magazine publisher father has re-married to a much younger woman (Erna Schurer). He fools around with his attractive new step-mother, but is much more interested in her equally attractive friend "Carol", who he follows around filming (what we today would call "stalking"). Although she already has a lover, "Carol" is unaccountably attracted to him too, even though he does such bizarre things as try to involve her in a three-way with an African-American woman, whom he dresses up in a Ku Klux Klan outfit, drips molten wax on her breasts, and orders Carol to whip!?!(Obviously, this movie isn't suffering much from starchy political correctness). It all ends very bizarrely.
This isn't a bad movie per se, but it's hard to know what to make of it. The title suggests it's a giallo, but it is generally lacking in violent giallo-esquire elements, at least until the very end. It does, however, have the kind of weird Freudian perversity of many late 60's/early 70's gialli. It could also be considered an erotic drama as typified by the Laura Gemser "Black Emanuelle" series that became popular later in the 70's. But even though the director Brunello Rondi would go on to direct one of the better films in that series ("Velluto Nero" aka "Black Emanuelle/White Emanuelle"), this early 70's movie doesn't really hold a candle to those later films (which were basically softcore porn) in terms of sexual content. This also might be considered a straight drama, but like a lot of Italian exploitation flicks, it is simply too ridiculous and the characters too thinly drawn and unbelievable to be able to take the whole thing very seriously.
It is very beautifully filmed and has good music, so it can certainly be enjoyed on that level at least. Cappolochino isn't much of an actor, but he would later appear in two superior gialli, "The House with Windows that Laugh" and "The Bloodstained Shadow", and most of his dialogue here is delivered in voice-over, so all he really has to do is look handsome and disturbed (which he certainly manages). Collette Descombes was only in a few Italian movies in her short career, but one of them was the seminal Umberto Lenzi-Carrol Baker giallo "Orgasmo". She got to play a deliciously evil character in that, but she was obviously much more at sea here with this bizarrely motivated character (but then pretty much anyone would have been). Erna Schurer, on the other hand, was in A LOT of Italian exploitation films, and--believe it or not--this may actually be one of her CLASSIER films (just check out "Naked and Lustful", "Strip Nude for Your Killer", or "Deported Women of the SS"). Like the cinematography, the actors certainly all look very pretty, and this movie is certainly weird enough to marginally hold your interest. It doesn't leave much of an impression though.
