Now this is more like it! An Italian/Canadian 'joint' that isn't dubbed, starts with the feel of a seventies TV movie but then veers madly in tone as the film goes on, and has the distinction of being on of the few De Martino films that doesn't drag. At all!
On the campus of a Montreal college, a young man watches as his ex-girlfriend has a very public argument with her lecturer and possible lover, Martin Landau. Scheming with her, the young man and the girl later play a prank on Landau when the girl (Carol, her name is Carol) fakes being ill during a party. When she non-prankingly dies after being administered medicine by Landau, he becomes suspect number one. Unluckily for him Carol's brother is hard-ass actor Stuart Whitman, and he's a cop to boot, with John Saxon as his icy-eyed partner.
De Martino scores a winner here because he's been clever enough to have a giallo (murder, many suspects, photograph clue etc) with all the elements of a Euro-crime film thrown in for good measure. For example, when we first meet Whitman, he's too busy blowing away bad guys to answer an important call from Carol, and when he approaches the transvestite community to merely ask them if they knew any transgender mates that have been missing, it turns into a huge, random, over the top battle where people are punched through glass windows, Whitman himself nearly falls off a building, and a transvestite gets a pair of straighteners up the arse for his/her trouble!
Not content with that, De Martino also throws in a random car chase that lasts for ages too, and this time he only wanted to show a guy a photo! These two scenes make the film a lot more fun than it would have been as a straight giallo, some I'm grateful they're there.
Tisa Farrow, who would go on to some real Italian exploitation highs in a few years after this film (Zombie Flesh Eaters, The Last Hunter and Anthropophagus), gets the best scenes as the blind piano tutor who is unlucky enough to have quite a bit of the film's action take place in her apartment. This might actually be my favourite De Martino film. Well done mate!
