Los mil ojos del asesino

The splendid but totally irrelevant title leads you to suspect that "Killer with a Thousand Eyes" is a giallo, but it's not. It's a euro crime/thriller. It's a Spanish/Italian co-production almost entirely filmed in Portugal, and I generally always love these European potpourris full of excessive violence, sleaze and testosterone-laden macho actors. "Killer with a Thousand Eyes" is an enjoyable effort as well, but nearly not the best of its type. There's plenty of action and quite an enormous body count, but the plot is very standard and full of cliched situations. A typical example is how the lead hero (giallo/western regular Anthony Steffen) continuously runs into people that have crucial information for him, but when they are about to reveal it, they are killed from a distance by an unseen assailant. This trick occurs in practically every euro-thriller, but no less than four times here, as if the writer/director Juan Bosch didn't have a whole lot of inspiration. Tough London Interpol agent Steffen is in Lisbon to investigate the murder of a fellow agent, and he discovers that his late colleague was on the verge of uncovering a wide smuggling and drug-trafficking network; - naturally with some very eminent people involved. Anthony Steffen wasn't a great actor, but this role fitted him well and he even looked a bit like Christopher Walken when he was younger. It's an overall mediocre movie, but there are a few nicely grisly murders, a decent soundtrack and a handful of lovely scenic images of Lisbon (including a car chase on the famous 25th of April Bridge)