Smile Before Death

Teenaged Nancy Thompson arrives unexpectedly at her mothers county villa.She discovers that her mom has died a violent death.The police investigate and believe the she killed herself by cutting her throat with a piece of broken of glass.Nancy meets and becomes friends with Gina who was her mothers best friend and who has a special relationship with her stepfather.Soon the older man turns his roving eye toward this young beauty as suspicion about the suicide starts to come to light.Pretty sleazy and entertaining Italian giallo with plenty of nudity and some nasty surprises.I haven't seen Silvio Amadio's "Amuck" yet,but I'd like to.The performances of Jenny Tamburi and sexy Rosalba Neri are fantastic and I must say that they are perhaps the main reasons to see this surprisingly obscure giallo.8 out of 10.

16-year-old boarding school student Nancy (Jenny Tamburi) arrives in town after her mother commits suicide. She is taken in by her stepfather Marco (Silvano Tranquilli), who has already moved in his mistress Gianna (Rosalba Neri). Things get a bit strange when Nancy begins to suspect her mother didn't commit suicide and puts the moves on both of her hosts. This is a nifty little thriller from Silvio (AMUCK!) Amadio with enough twists and turns to keep you interested. The main mystery isn't too hard to guess, but there is a nice extra twist at the end and, of course, another one for good measure. Tamburi and the gorgeous Neri spend a lot of their screen time nude and that certainly helps too. Quite possibly the best thing about the film is a theme that is so catchy with Amadio using it at every opportunity. You will definitely be humming it for days after watching this one.

The sinfully slinky 'Smile Before Death' aka 'Il Sorriso della iena' (1972) remains a bizarrely under scrutinized, salaciously saucy slasher from cult Italian film-maker, Silvio 'Amuck!' Amadio. This deliciously deviant, unjustly obscure, sublimely sexy, full-bloodied, sensuously soft-bodied Giallo features that deliciously divine brunette Rosalba Neri, the wickedly sultry queen of B-Movie scream and hellaciously hunky, Hiram Keller as a voluptuously-villainous duo plotting to do most grievous harm to the stepdaughter of Hiram's resolutely ill-minded character.

Bravura genre director Silvio Amadio's breezily stylish and frequently raunchy follow-up to "Amuck!" is fulsomely engorged with giddy plot twists, plentifully lurid stalk an' slash, and is busily replete with the ubiquitous "shock" ending rabid Gialli/thriller fans so ardently crave! 'Smile before Death' is most certainly guaranteed to amuse and bemuse in equally confounding measure, and remains an entirely worthy entry to this most histrionic of iconoclastic, bombastic film idioms. This gorgeous Giallo's relative rarity is wholly undeserved and one sincerely hopes that eventually it will soon get a glisteringly-restored Italian language, UK-friendly, feature-loaded DVD/Blu-ray release that this tremendously exciting thriller so earnestly deserves!

Easily 60% of the run time of this movie has an absurdly annoying song playing on a loop. It is downright maddening. There are some twists, meh, whatever. The main chick has a great rack, I've give the movie that.

I've pretty much seen all the classics as well as the hidden gems of the Italian sub genre of Giallo, so what remains now are the more obscure and undiscovered gems … If I'm lucky, at least. "Smile before Death" is such a film Giallo connoisseurs have certainly heard about already, but the film remains unavailable on DVD to this day and if you really want to see it you have to be satisfied with a computer ripped bootleg version with poor picture quality and unidentifiable foreign subtitles. "Smile before Death" is not bad, but certainly not great neither (otherwise it would be wider known by now, ha!) This isn't exactly what I would call the most exciting Giallo ever made. It opens promisingly enough, with the murder of a middle-aged woman in a remote country estate. The bedroom door was locked from the inside when they found the body and her throat was slit with a piece of glass that was found in her hand, so the police close the case as suicide. The teenage daughter Nancy comes to the estate and befriends her mother's best friend, a photographer, as well as her handsome lover. The initially shy Nancy is quickly drawn into the sleazy world of nude modeling and the sexual affection of mature men. She doesn't know, however, that the clue to solving her mother's dead lies with these same people and that she's actually an obstacle in the killer(s) complete fiendish scheme. "Smile before Death" a stylish but sadly dull and underwhelming mystery thriller. Apart from the murder on the mother near the beginning, which is shown repeatedly and at least three times, there's nothing even remotely suspenseful going on. I remember from "Amuck" – the other Giallo by Silvio Amadio – that the director is more interested in the naked bodies of his lead actresses than in suspense and gruesome killing. I can't say I blame him, especially when working with Rosalba Neri, but the lack of excitement here is really intolerable. The theme song is great but overused and after a while I got sick and tired of staring at the young lead actress' naked body. That's never a good sign. Patient viewers will be rewarded with an acceptably entertaining – albeit predictable and derivative – climax, but it's too late to safe the movie. One of the most disappointing Gialli I ever saw.