Even when he was not wearing his familiar "Hombre Lobo" make-up, Paul Naschy was an omnipresent and versatile leading man of Spanish-made horror and exploitation. He appeared in movies about the inquisition, stories dealing with satanic rites, he depicted the devil himself, and starred as a hideous hunchback as well as a hunky womanizer in multiple Gialli. In short, Naschy was a genre monument and I strongly recommend everyone to seek out the documentary "The Man who Saw Frankenstein Cry" about his life and work.
This review ironically covers one of the weaker films in Naschy's extended oeuvre. Or better said, I personally consider it one of his weaker efforts. "The Crimes of Petiot" is extremely obscure, and perhaps righteously so because the story, the horror aspects, and the plot-twists are quite disappointing. Oh, and the soundtrack saddled me up with a terrible headache since it primarily exists of monotonous and mind-penetrating noises.
The name in the title refers to the notorious French serial murderer Marcel Petiot, who was a deeply deranged doctor and politician during World War II. The plot of the film doesn't have anything to do with the real crimes of Petiot, though, and - in fact - takes place more than 20 years after the war, and in Berlin. There are Giallo-trademarks, like for example a black-gloved killer who's stalking his/her victims in a park at night, but his/her modus operandi is very anti-giallo because they are shot with a Luger pistol rather than stabbed, strangled, or sexually molested. Naschy stars as the fiancé of a newspaper journalist who wants to set an ambush for the killer together with a colleague of hers who's also one of the prime suspects. Positive points for the use of settings, which are eerie tunnel networks under the park, and - like another reviewer already mentioned - the police detectives on the case aren't dumb for once. Negative points for the dull and predictable end-twist, the uninspired kills, and the misleading title.
