The Killer Reserved Nine Seats

Giuseppe Bennati's The Killer Reserved Nine Seats is a curious relic from the golden era of Italian genre cinema, a gothic-flavored giallo that unfolds like an Agatha Christie whodunit soaked in the brooding excesses of Euro-horror. It's a film with a richly atmospheric setting and flashes of visual style, but its potential is undercut by flat pacing, uneven performances, and a script that fumbles its own intrigue. Still, for those who appreciate vintage horror curios with operatic flair, there's enough here to keep the lights dimmed and the curiosity piqued.

Set almost entirely inside a decaying, ornate theater that seems to have a mind of its own, the film creates an intoxicating sense of place. The production design is easily the highlight: crumbling velvet seats, looming statues, and dim corridors evoke a haunted stage lost to time. The camera prowls through these spaces with deliberate unease, often capturing characters as isolated figures against the echo of grandeur and decay. It's this visual commitment to setting that gives the film its most memorable quality, even when the storytelling falters.

Chris Avram anchors the ensemble as the aristocratic Patrick, who invites a group of affluent acquaintances to the shuttered theater he owns for what is ostensibly a private gathering. Avram brings a cold detachment to the role, though his delivery feels stilted at times. Rosanna Schiaffino lends her regal presence to the cast, radiating both suspicion and vulnerability, while Eva Czemerys injects a sensual volatility that suits the genre's baroque tendencies. None of the performances truly elevate the material, but they inhabit the space well enough to serve the film's theatrical premise.

As the group begins to be picked off one by one, the film attempts to build a mystery laced with supernatural overtones, family secrets, and past sins clawing their way to the surface. Unfortunately, the rhythm stutters under repetitive sequences and underdeveloped character dynamics. The script tries to be twisty, but its reveals are clumsily handled and often undermine the suspense rather than deepen it. The kills, while sometimes creatively staged, lack the visceral impact or inventiveness seen in more iconic entries of the giallo canon.

Director Bennati, more known for his television work, handles the visual palette with flair but struggles to maintain narrative cohesion or mounting tension. The result is a film that is more interesting to look at than to follow. The mood lingers, but the plot never truly grips.

A whole bunch of reprehensible people turn up at a disused theatre on the night of rich aristocrat Patrick Devenant. These people are your usual Euro-film bunch of double crosser and promiscuous deviants: there's a few lesbians, a married couple, a couple who want to get married. That kind of thing, plus all the usual infidelities. The theatre is run by a creepy guy who turns up to spout something dodgy about the people or the theatre, then disappears again.

It comes as no surprise that a black-gloved killer or killers is/are on the prowl and the first guy to nearly get it is Patrick, who narrowly dodges a huge wooden block that's dropped on his head. Naturally this prompts a lot of discussion from everyone about how much money Patrick has and who would want it. When the first victim is stabbed in the back while performing Romeo and Juliet on stage, the rest of the folks discover the phone lines cut and the door locked. They now have to spend the whole night together and one of them may be the killer...

I've got to admit to being a bit underwhelmed with this one. Too much jibber jabber and not enough...err...dibber stabber. Overlong to considering the premise, with many scenes content to have the actors endlessly discussing what's going on, blaming each other, putting the moves on each other, or wandering off alone to get murdered by a killer who wears a mask that makes him/her look like Alan Sugar. There's plenty of nudity however, but that just serves to slow down things even more.

It's not a total loss, however. There's a nice supernatural angle to the film where the curator of the theatre might be a ghost, disembodied voices call to the actors, and there's a confusing bit where a dummy looks alive...for a second or two. We also get a strange painting that depicts the fate of the character and the whole theatre setting gives the film a nice gothic horror feel.

What it needed more of was random daftness and poor taste - we do get one character throwing caution to the wind, necking a bunch of pills, and dancing around naked in the middle of this murder fest, and there's a bit of nastiness when someone has their hand nailed to a post, but there's too much talk for me. An okay giallo, but not a great one.

Despite suffering from many flaws and shortcomings, "The Killer Reserved Nine Seats" is still warmly recommended to fans of the Italian giallo (and we know their number increases every day!). The absolute greatest and most inventive titles of this wonderful Italian horror sub genre pretty much all received fancy DVD-editions by now, so there must be some very good reasons why this film is still obscure and hard to find. And yes, it doesn't take the slightly experienced giallo-fanatic very long to figure out that Giuseppe Bennati's effort is far inferior to – let's say – the work of Sergio Martino or Dario Argento. Gialli are almost fundamentally blessed with a fantastic musical score, yet the opening tune in "The Killer Reserved Nine Seats" is ugly as sin and suggests an entirely wrong ambiance. The music isn't the biggest shortcoming, but it's definitely what bothered me the most as I expect a giallo-score to haunt my dreams for several more nights. On the night of his birthday, millionaire Patrick Davenant invites eight of his acquaintances to an abandoned theater that he owns but never visits. The atmosphere in the group is hostile, yet they stay close to Patrick as they all depend on his fortune. After a bit of wandering around the old theater, the first girl is brutally murdered with a dagger and the rest of the group discovers that the place carries an ancient curse. Is there really some kind of evil supernatural force luring from within the walls? Or is one of these nine people an old-fashioned flesh & blood killer? Let's just say the answer to this question is not hard to predict, but it'll still take many corpses before the characters know for sure...

Let's start with discussing the BEST elements about this film! "The Killer Reserved Nine Seats" is a decent and straightforward murder-mystery with a reasonably fair amount of plot-twists and intrigue. Not nearly as convoluted as most gialli, but compelling enough to keep you alert and hoping for a surprising denouement. Undoubtedly the greatest aspect about this film is the claustrophobic theater setting, which provides the story with an uncanny almost Gothic atmosphere. This same original setting offers the opportunity to make the murders ingenious and somewhat special. The deaths of the lesbian lovers, whose mutilated bodies are exhibited like some kind of stage tableau, are the finest examples to state this. There are several insurmountable problems with the script, however. There's way too much talking about irrelevant stuff and the characters do incredibly stupid things, like leaving the group to investigate the dark and secret corridors of the theater all on their own. Not smart. The supernatural sub plot is overall stupid and definitely not very efficient as a red herring, but I suppose it was a worthwhile attempt. The acting performances are surprisingly adequate and – very important – there's a fine share of genuine Euro-sleaze. Every actress takes her clothes off at least once and they all have ravishing bodies. That HAS to count for something, right?

Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians serves as the basis for giallo The Killer Reserved Nine Seats, which sees a group of bickering friends, relatives and acquaintances, all of whom have complex relationships and serious character flaws, assemble at a deserted theatre where they find themselves locked in and killed off one-by-one by a masked assailant. Is the murderer flesh and blood or a malevolent spirit driven by a centuries old curse?

If the film had stuck to a simple murder-by-numbers plot, it could have been a very effective thriller— after all, the same basic set-up served Michele Soavi well for his excellent '80s slasher Stagefright (1987)—but the supernatural element makes The Killer Reserved Nine Seats way too bewildering for its own good, with a frustrating finale that fails to make matters clear. Thank heavens, then, for those mainstays of the giallo, violence and nudity…

With such a collection of disagreeable characters, there are plenty of well deserved deaths, although they are less graphic than I had expected: some reviews have remarked on the nastiness of the murders, but barring the nailing of one woman's arm to a wooden beam (an effect that uses a hilarious plastic-looking fake hand), the violence seemed rather tame to me (I definitely didn't see any crotch stabbing), leading me to wonder whether the version I watched was shorn of some gore.

Thankfully, all of the nudity seemed intact, with virtually all of the female characters getting nekkid at some point, either willingly, or by having their clothes torn off by the killer before being brutally dispatched. This certainly helps to make the film more entertaining, especially the scene in which one woman takes time out amidst all the murder to dance topless to some funky music.

"L'Assassino ha riservato nove poltrone"(The killer reserved nine seats) is one of those films that stayed with me.

I've seen a copy with Greek subtitles. According to IMDb, the film has a running time of 99 minutes and this copy I've ordered runs around 92 minutes. So 7 minutes were cut out from the original film and now maybe the cut footage is lost forever. The DVD was visibly taken from a VHS tape and even if the colors are a bit drab and the images sometimes a bit jittery, the film is still quite watchable. Anyway it would be wonderful to see the film in a restored and remastered edition (uncut if possible).

The film drew inspiration from Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians" – Ten people are invited to an abandoned theater in an out-of-the-way place. The theater looms gigantic in the night when they arrive. A sense of foreboding underlined by the soundtrack creeps in. These people know each other and are linked by love/hate relationships – greed, love, sex, bitterness are their companions. The camera shows the chandeliers, the pictures on the wall show faces were luxury and greed meet, the decors.... Everything takes us back to a glorious past – lust, grandeur, suffering, intrigues ... – all gone now....

The killings begin. Where is the killer hiding? Long corridors, dressing rooms, the backstage, the imposing stairs that lead to upper floors.... Is He or She one of them? Later on we get to know that there's a family curse hanging over the theater. Are supernatural forces at work? This is a very atmospheric thriller in which the camera and the soundtrack work well together. The story somehow doesn't make much sense. The behavior of the characters (like other reviewers already pointed out) is far from logical. They wander alone in badly lit corridors, enter dark rooms, almost like they were inviting the killer to take care of them. And the killer is very, very sadistic.

The action of the "The killer reserved nine seats" takes place during the night. It's a "long night's journey into day", but it's a day that maybe no one will reach alive (as one of the characters dejectedly says). The film is tense and claustrophobic, but also lighthearted and ironical, like all good gialli. There are also the moments of sleaze, something very good to release the tension – the women undress themselves whenever they can, and there's also a lesbian couple among the lot: Rosanna Schiaffino, Paola Senatore, Lucretia Love, Eva Czemerys, Janet Agren – take your pick. There's a moment of surrealistic sleaze that would have made even Buñuel take his hat off – many people had already been knocked off and what Paola Senatore does? She puts on some music, takes off her clothes, and dances semi-naked in front of a mirror. What?! Well, anyway I enjoyed the scene a lot. Thanks, Paola!

Something that I want to stress again is the atmosphere conveyed by the film – the characters and decors, underlined by the imaginative soundtrack, seem to join their hands to paint a picture of lust, desire, decadence and tired joie-de-vivre. One can go back to the time when some Italian renaissance masters were able to portray luxury and ambiguity living together with virtue (whatever that means:).

"The killer reserved nine seats" is an interesting film that deserves more recognition and to be presented to the public in a restored and remastered edition. It's creative, bizarre and intriguing. It's certainly not a run-of-the-mill giallo. It's a worthy film to check out.