Knife of Ice (1972)

Knife of Ice (Il coltello di ghiaccio), released in 1972, was the fourth movie Umberto Lenzi made with star Carroll Baker and it’s a bit of a change of pace.

The first three movies are what I describe as proto-gialli - they have some of the style and feel of the later gialli but there are major differences. They’re stylish erotic thrillers that lack the blood and gore of the full-blown giallo. Knife of Ice is an interesting hybrid. Structurally it’s a giallo but in style and tone it’s a proto-giallo. And it has hints of the supernatural.

This was a Spanish-Italian co-production set in Spain. The bullfight credits sequence seems to have no connection to the rest of the movie but in fact it includes a clue.

Umberto Lenzi co-wrote the screenplay with Antonio Troiso. The original inspiration for this movie was Robert Siodmak’s 1946 classic The Spiral Staircase, a movie for which Lenzi had enormous admiration. Lenzi and Troiso made major changes to the plot so if you know how The Spiral Staircase ends that won’t help you in guessing the ending of Knife of Ice. Lenzi did not want to do a remake but rather a totally different movie taking the 1946 movie as a jumping-off point.

Martha Caldwell (Carroll Baker) arrives at her uncle’s home in Spain with her cousin and best friend Jenny Ascot (Ida Galli). Her uncle suffers from a severe heart complaint. He’s being treated by Dr Laurent (Alan Scott). It’s not quite clear if Dr Laurent is Martha’s boyfriend but they’re obviously close.

Then two murders take place. It seems there is a serial killer on the loose. The police find occult symbols and evidence of a Black Mass having taken place. There are signs that a satanic cult might be active. Two of the central characters have a great interest in the occult. There’s a crazy guy hanging around and he seems to be on the scene when a murder takes place. Inspector Duran (Franco Fantasia) certainly thinks he could be dealing with satanic cult murders.

Then the plot twists start to kick in. Regardless of the identity of the murderer or the motive there’s no doubt that Martha has been marked down for murder.

There’s no shortage of sinister suspects. There’s Martha’s occult-obsessed uncle, there’s the slightly creepy housekeeper, there’s the weird satanist guy, there’s the doctor, there’s the black-clad chauffeur.

Like a full-blown giallo this movie has multiple murders but there are no spectacular murder visual set-pieces. Lenzi is more interested in the atmosphere and in building a sense of dread. We feel that Martha is in great danger but we don’t know why and that adds to the dread.

This movie not only lacks gore, it also has no nudity or sex. That probably hurt it at the box office. Lenzi’s three previous movies with Carrol Baker were sexy thrillers and they were huge hits. Knife of Ice enjoyed much more modest commercial success.

Those earlier Lenzi-Baker movies were very stylish films with an atmosphere of glamour and decadence. In this film Lenzi is aiming for a very different feel. He throws in quite a few gothic horror tropes and the overwhelming tone of the movie is gothic. He keeps us in doubt as to whether it might turn out to be gothic horror or merely gothic melodrama but the gothic vibe is strong. There are plenty of moody creepy fog-bound scenes. It’s obvious that Lenzi was determined not to get stuck in a rut. A couple of years later he would turn the giallo genre upside-down and inside-out with his brilliant Spasmo.

Martha is mute. She isn’t deaf. She experienced an appalling shock as a child (seeing her parents killed in a train accident) and she hasn’t been able to speak since. It’s a challenging role for an actress but Carroll Baker does an excellent job.

Alan Scott is very dull as the doctor but the supporting players are very good.

Knife of Ice is low-key but enthralling and I enjoyed it immensely. Highly recommended.

Severin’s Blu-Ray includes something increasingly rare these days - genuinely worthwhile extras. There’s a longish and very informative interview with Lenzi and a very perceptive video essay by Stephen Thrower.

I’ve also reviewed the first three Lenzi-Baker collaborations, Orgasmo (AKA Paranoia, 1969), So Sweet...So Perverse (1969) and A Quiet Place To Kill (1970).

Almost Human (1974)

Almost Human (Milano odia: la polizia non può sparare) is a 1974 poliziottesco directed by Umberto Lenzi. This is the first of half a dozen poliziotteschi Lenzi made with star Tomas Milian. Confusingly it has been released with numerous different titles.

Milian is Giulio Sacchi, a particularly dumb hoodlum. After he almost causes a bank robbery to go wrong Giulio gets beaten up by his accomplices. He decides to strike out on his own. He’s ambitious. He’s going to pull a really really big job. He’s going to kidnap Marilù Porrino (Laura Belli), the daughter of a fabulously rich industrialist.

Giulio is ambitious but he’s too dumb and too crazy to figure out that he’s unlikely to get away with it. Especially with accomplices like Vittorio (Gino Santercole) and Carmine (Ray Lovelock). Vittorio is just dumb but Carmine is an obvious weak link - he’s young, emotional and highly strung. Once the killings start he’s not going to cope very well.

And the killings start immediately. Giulio does not intend to leave a single witness alive. Anyone who knows anything at all, no matter how insignificant, is going to be killed. Giulio has obtained three submachine-guns. They are going to get a lot of use.

Commissario Walter Grandi (Henry Silva) is a no-nonsense cop who knows his job. Giulio has left a few minor loose ends and Grandi is slowly putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

This is certainly a violent movie. The violence is graphic and it’s doubly shocking in its remorselessness. You know that anybody who crosses Giulio’s path is going to die in a hail of machine-gun bullets.

Marilù’s father is willing to pay the ransom. Commissario Grandi has no doubts that if the ransom is paid the girl will be killed anyway. And we know right from the start that that’s what Giulio intends to do.

As you might expect things get tense between the three hoodlums but Giulio’s plan seems to be working. The trail of corpses he leaves behind provide Commissario Grandi with vital clues but no hard evidence - dead witnesses don’t talk.

Tomas Milian plays Giulio as a vicious out-of-control thug. Any attempt to give the movie a political interpretation, to see Giulio as a representative of the suffering downtrodden masses, comes up against the problem that Giulio is one of the least sympathetic protagonists in movie history. He has no redeeming features. We feel no sympathy for him whatsoever. He’s always been a loser and we want to see him keep losing. Any attempt to see neo-noir elements in the film is similarly doomed. Giulio has not been corrupted or led astray or forced into a life of crime - he is rotten all the way through right from the start. We are entirely on the side of Commissario Grandi - we want to see Giulio hunted down like an animal and killed. Milian’s performance is remarkable in its sheer excessiveness.

Ray Loveock is pretty good as Carmine. He’s a marginally more sympathetic character perhaps but while he’s a jumpy nervous killer he’s still a killer. Henry Silva gives a fairly nuanced performance - Grandi does not come across as conforming to the usual movie cop clichés.

Lenzi had the ability to make interesting movies in lots of different genres and to avoid the obvious clichés. In this case having a screenplay by the great Ernesto Gastaldi certainly helped. This is a poliziottesco but the focus is less on the cops and more on the psycho killer.

There’s a fine car chase early on and the action scenes are well-mounted and are not lacking in shock effect.

Giulio might be unintelligent but his very ruthlessness makes him a formidable problem for the police. And he does have a certain crazed cunning. They might know that he is guilty but finding actual evidence is a problem since Giulio leaves no-one alive to give evidence against him. He really doesn’t care how many people he kills. Commissario Grandi seems to be coming up against a brick wall.

The plot is basic but Almost Human has style and energy and a great deal of raw power. Highly recommended.

This movie has had countless DVD and Blu-Ray releases. Severin’s is the most recent (in their Violent Streets Umberto Lenzi boxed set) and it looks great and includes a host of extras.

Syndicate Sadists (1975)

Syndicate Sadists (Il giustiziere sfida la città) is a 1975 movie directed by Umberto Lenzi that falls within the poliziotteschi genre.

This is not a cop movie. The police play no part whatsoever in the story. This is more of a lone wolf hero vigilante movie.

It begins with a mysterious stranger riding into town. He rides a motorcycle rather than a horse but this movie does have major western elements.

The stranger is Rambo (Tomas Milian) and yes the name was taken from the books on which the Sylvester Stallone movies were based. Rambo is a loner. He doesn’t like authority. His buddy Scalia (Mario Piave) works for a private police force. This was the period of Italian history known as the Years of Lead, with violent crime getting out of control and regular terrorist outrages. The idea of rich people turning to private cops rather than the official police has plenty of plausibility. Scalia wants Rambo to join up but Rambo isn’t a team player. This is the equivalent of the scene in dozens of westerns in which the hero is offered a sheriff’s badge or a deputy’s badge but turns it down.

Scalia is trying to solve a kidnapping on his own, to further his career. Milan is run by two criminal organisations, the equivalent of rival outlaw gangs in a western. There’s the Conti gang, run by a hoodlum named Conti (Luciano Catenacci), and the Paternò gang, run by old man Paternò (Joseph Cotten). Paternò is old and blind and his hot-headed son has ambitions to take over.

Rambo has no interest in the case, until something happens that gives him a personal score to settle. Now he intends to wage a one-man war against both gangs.

Vincenzo Mannino’s script is basically a grab-bag of clichés. Lenzi wasn’t enthusiastic about doing this movie and wasn’t happy with it. It’s easy to see why but Tomas Milian’s charismatic performance and the excellent action scenes more than compensate for the deficiencies of the screenplay. There are as many car and motorcycle chases as any reasonable person could wish for.

While the plot might be lacking in originality it holds together very satisfactorily and it provides the necessary excuses for the action scenes.

There’s also plenty of violence but it’s not especially graphic. Lenzi is more interested in giving the viewer an adrenalin rush than in relying on gore.

There is however a copious expenditure of small arms ammunition.

The final showdown is superbly executed and very tense and exciting.

Lenzi paces the film extremely well.

There’s no sex and no nudity. The emphasis is entirely on action and Lenzi is not going to distract us from that for a moment.

There’s no complexity to any of the characters. Rambo is just another mysterious gunslinger of the kind so familiar in westerns.

The one possible exception is old man Paternò, who has a strange and interesting attitude towards Rambo. It’s possible that Rambo is the son he’d have liked to have had, instead of the idiot son he actually has. This relationship could perhaps have been developed a bit more. Joseph Cotten has his moments in this film but he looks very old and frail. Of course that’s the point of the character, that he’s an old man losing his grip on his organisation so Cotten’s performance does actually work quite well.

Don’t expect anything profound or ground-breaking from this movie. Just sit back and enjoy the roller-coaster ride and the mayhem, and enjoy watching Tomas Milian giving a master-class in charisma.

My liking for Umberto Lenzi grows with each Lenzi film I see. Syndicate Sadists is top-notch entertainment, highly recommended.

This is one of five films in Severin’s Violent Streets Umberto Lenzi/Tomas Milian poliziotteschi Blu-Ray boxed set. Extras include interviews with various people involved in the film, the most interesting being the Lenzi interview. The transfer is superb. English and Italian language options are provided.

Orgasmo (AKA Paranoia, 1969)

OK, first things first. In 1969 Umberto Lenzi made a movie called Paranoia. The Italian distributors changed the title to Orgasmo, a less appropriate but at the time more commercial title. In 1970 Lenzi made another movie called Paranoia, a movie that is also known as A Quiet Place To Kill. In order to minimise confusion I think it’s advisable to call his 1969 movie Orgasmo and his 1970 movie A Quiet Place To Kill. That way we know which movies we’re talking about. So I will refer to the movie that is the subject of this review as Orgasmo.

There’s another matter that needs to be cleared up. Severin’s Blu-Ray release includes two different cuts of the movie. The first is the Director’s Cut. This is in fact the original cut. This is the movie that Lenzi made. The second cut is the X-Rated U.S. cut. Don’t get excited by this - this version is in fact less raunchy than the Director’s Cut. This is a hacked-up shortened version of the film that eliminates Lenzi’s ending, which has the effect of totally ruining the movie. Don’t waste your time on this version. Watch the Director’s Cut.

Orgasmo is generally considered to be a giallo. In fact there were two distinct phases or waves of the giallo genre. The first wave lasted from around 1967 to 1970 with one or two later outliers. The second wave began with Dario Argento’s The Bird With the Crystal Plumage in 1970. These two phases are so radically different that it’s important to be clear that they are totally separate and distinctive sub-genres, with their own conventions. The second wave giallos are visually flamboyant blood-drenched thrillers usually involving lots of murders and black-gloved serial killers. The first wave are stylish erotic thrillers, with often only one or at the most two murders. The first wave giallos are characterised by an atmosphere of jet-set decadence and glamour.

Both sub-genres have much to recommend them. Most people prefer the post-Argento second wave giallos. Personally I much prefer the first wave giallos which have much more interesting plots and characters and an emphasis on eroticism that is both more subtle and more genuinely perverse than the second wave.

The first wave giallos are often dismissed by fans who are disappointed that they differ so radically from the post-Argento giallo.

Umberto Lenzi made four films starring Carroll Baker and these films are superb examples of the first wave giallo.

Orgasmo begins with a very very rich widow named Kathryn (Carroll Baker). She meets a hunky young American named Peter (Lou Castel). She allows lust to cloud her judgment and begins an affair with him although there are some red flags she should have noticed.

Kathryn is a little unstable and a little too fond of a drink.

Peter’s sister Eva (Colette Descombes) turns up. Kathryn finds it fun hanging with these two exciting sexy youngsters. They are much younger than Kathryn and this seems to be what she finds most seductive about them. She’s in her mid-30s and she’s starting to become aware that her youth has slipped away from her.

She finds it hard to keep up with them but Eva keeps feeding her pills which helps.

Kathryn thinks she understands the situation and she thinks she’s in control of it. She starts to wonder about this when she catches Peter and Eva in bed together. It’s OK, they can explain everything. Kathryn is deeply shocked.

The truth is that Kathryn is more old-fashioned than she thought she was. She enjoys playing at decadence and playing at being a bad girl but for her it’s just a game and she gets frightened when it starts to get real.

And she is now in a situation which makes her very frightened and confused. She drinks more and takes more pills. She starts to lose touch with reality just a little.

It builds to a very twisted conclusion (assuming you’re watching the Director’s Cut). It’s a great gut-punch ending.

This movie was a triumphant comeback for Carroll Baker after a nightmarish period in Hollywood. It’s a difficult demanding complex rôle and she handles it with ease. A great actress at the top of her game.

There’s very little violence but what violence there is is genuinely shocking not because it’s graphic but because it’s emotionally wrenching and it makes us deeply uncomfortable. Lenzi doesn’t need to throw buckets of blood at us in order to get our attention.

There’s some nudity and very little sex but again Lenzi knows how to create an atmosphere of dangerous unhealthy eroticism, and he knows how to do it subtly. And there’s a wonderfully decadent atmosphere.

Lenzi really found himself as a director with this film. Orgasmo is very very stylish.

Whatever you think of its status as a giallo Orgasmo is a superb erotic thriller. Very highly recommended.

Severin’s Blu-Ray release offers a lovely transfer. There are two audio commentaries.

I’ve also reviewed the second of the Lenzi-Baker collaborations, the wonderful So Sweet...So Perverse (1969).

A Quiet Place To Kill (1970)

A Quiet Place To Kill was the third of the four gialli directed by Umberto Lenzi and starring Carroll Baker. It should be noted that the first of these four movies, Orgasmo, was released in the U.S. as Paranoia. Confusingly the third movie was entitled Paranoia in Italy but released internationally as A Quiet Place To Kill. To keep things as clear as possible we will refer to it here as A Quiet Place To Kill (which is in any case a much better title).

This movie is what I call a Phase 1 or early period giallo. You could also refer to this period as the pre-Argento giallo period. Argento’s 1970 The Bird with the Crystal Plumage redefined the giallo. Henceforward Phase 2 or late period gialli would mostly be serial killer movies, they would invariably feature a black-gloved killer and they would be characterised by an over-the-top baroque visual style with lots of blood.

Phase 1 or early period gialli are quite different. There’s not a great deal of blood. They are usually not serial killer movies. They don’t necessarily involve black-gloved killers. They are erotic thrillers and they are just as stylish as the later gialli but in a different, more subtle way. They also usually have an atmosphere of Swinging 60s decadence. I personally enjoy these early gialli a great deal and Umberto Lenzi did them very well indeed.

These early gialli have been overshadowed by the more flamboyant and blood-drenched later gialli but I actually have a slight preference for these earlier movies. Movies like Lucio Fulci’s One on Top of the Other (AKA Perversion Story, 1969), Romolo Guerrieri’s The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968) and Lenzi’s So Sweet, So Perverse (1969).

A Quiet Place To Kill begins with a lady racing car driver having a near-fatal racetrack smash-up. She is Helen and she is payed by Carroll Baker. She will need to take things easy for a while. She is rather surprised to receive an invitation from Maurice (Jean Sorel) to spend some time recuperating at his villa. Maurice is her ex-husband. They did not part on friendly terms.

Helen gets another surprise when she arrives at the villa. Maurice has remarried. His new wife is Constance (Anna Proclemer). Maurice usually goes for younger more glamorous women. On the other hand Constance is rich, and Maurice definitely goes for rich women.

The atmosphere is rather tense. Constance is having dramas with her daughter. She doesn’t seem to have too much confidence in Maurice’s faithfulness. And Maurice’s desire to get Helen into bed is all too obvious. Helen has reasons to hate Maurice but she still feels a powerful sexual attraction for him. Then Constance tells Helen something rather surprising.

Initially it seems like this is going to be a conventional romantic triangle leading to the consequences that one might expect. But then the plot twists start to kick in and things get rather unpredictable.

I’m not going to say any more about the plot for fear of revealing spoilers.

Jean Sorel was definitely the ideal actor for this type of movie. Maurice is charming, amusing, handsome, sexy and (as both Helen and Constance agree) remarkably good in bed. He is also cynical and totally amoral, untrustworthy, irresponsible, decadent and quite possibly dangerous. A sensible woman would have nothing to do with him, but he’s so charming and sexy that women find it difficult to be sensible about him. Jean Sorel nails the character to perfection.

Carroll Baker was close to being the perfect giallo actress - very sexy but very likeable and possibly dangerous. And a very fine and versatile (and somewhat underrated) actress.

And The Sweet Body of Deborah in 1968 had already established that Sorel and Baker had real chemistry.

Umberto Lenzi should be more admired as a director than he is, and he made some great gialli including the wildly offbeat but brilliant Spasmo (1974). His late 60s and early 70s movies in particular are deserving of more attention. His early gialli are stylish without being showy, and he certainly could capture the atmosphere of the decadent jet set.

I don’t recall any blood at all in this movie, which will certainly puzzle giallo fans. There’s some nudity, but not much. There are no actual sex scenes.

If you go into A Quiet Place To Kill expecting a conventional giallo of the type that became ubiquitous in the 70s you may be disappointed. This represents a distinctive sub-genre of the giallo and it may be counter-productive to consider these late 60s movies as gialli at all. This is an erotic thriller and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s an interesting genre and one of which I’m very fond. The focus here is on twisted emotional and erotic relationships and the screenplay and the acting are of sufficiently high calibre to make it an intelligent provocative look at such relationships.

A Quiet Place To Kill is a brilliant little movie and it’s very highly recommended.

The Severin Blu-Ray offers a fully restored transfer which looks luscious.

So Sweet...So Perverse (1969)

So Sweet...So Perverse (Così dolce... così perversa) was the second of the series of gialli made by Umberto Lenzi and starring Carroll Baker. It was released in 1969.

Jean Reynaud (Jean-Louis Trintignant) lives in a swank Paris apartment with his wife Danielle (Erika Blanc). Their marriage could best be described as an armed truce. They don’t sleep together. Jean has affairs. At the moment he’s having an affair with a married woman, Helene Valmont (Helga Liné).

Jean is chronically bored. He is always searching for something, anything, to relieve his boredom.

The apartment on the top floor, just above theirs, has just been rented by an American woman. We will soon find out that this is Nicole Perrier (Carroll Baker). Jean notices her immediately. He always notices beautiful women.

Then he hears sounds from Nicole’s apartment. It sounds like a violent argument between a man and a woman and the woman sounds frightened. Jean races upstairs but Nicole’s apartment is locked and no-one will answer the door.

Then Jean remembers that he has a key to that upstairs apartment. It had been given to him when the apartment was untenanted and he had forgotten to return it. He heads upstairs again and lets himself in. He finds Nicole in an agitated state, but she refuses his offers of help.

Jean doesn’t think too much more about the incident but the following day he spots Nicole in the street. He follows her, to a photographic studio. He hears another violent argument. Nicole bursts out of the door, again very agitated, and asks Jean to take her away from there.

When he finally persuades her to talk she tells him about Klaus and about how much she hates him, but she can’t break away from him. Klaus is cruel and brutal and twisted and sadistic. But Nicole keeps going back to him. He excites her.

This should have been a red flag for Jean, but Jean thinks of himself as a sophisticated man of the world and as a man who can handle any situation. He doesn’t want to admit that he might be getting out of his depth with Nicole.

He will soon discover just how far out of his depth he already is.

He has fallen hard for Nicole. They begin an affair. Danielle is jealous and upset. Jean did not expect that. It is possible that Jean is one of those men who doesn’t understand women anywhere near as well as he thinks he does.

Jean and Danielle set off for a romantic getaway but the bad news is that Klaus has tracked them down.

Then the plot twists start to come thick and fast and they’re delightfully twisted and nasty. You can't take anybody in this movie at face value.

This movie belongs to an incredibly interesting period in the history of the giallo. Mario Bava had made a full-blown giallo in 1964, Blood and Black Lace, but it failed to start a trend. Then, right at the tail end of the 60s, came a number of movies in which you can see the giallo beginning to emerge as a distinct genre but with a slightly different feel to the movies that followed in the wake of Dario Argento’s 1970 Bird with the Crystal Plumage. These late 60s movies were all about sex, decadence, betrayal and murder among the rich and glamorous (what was known at the time as the Jet Set). These movies included Romolo Guerrieri’s The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968) and Lucio Fulci’s One on Top of the Other (1969) as well as the first couple of Umberto Lenzi-Carroll Baker gialli.

So Sweet...So Perverse taps into the same vein of decadence, betrayal and murder.

The screenplay was mostly the work of Ernesto Gastaldi and that’s a major plus. His screenwriting credits include such gems as the excellent gothic horror The Long Hair of Death and important gialli including The Sweet Body of Deborah, The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh, All the Colors of the Dark and Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key as well as the fascinating Secrets of a Call Girl (AKA Anna, The Pleasure, The Torment, 1973).

Carroll Baker is of course fabulous. But Jean-Louis Trintignant and Erika Blanc are just as good and their characters are just as important. Helga Liné is good also and Horst Frank is wonderfully sinister. This really is a great cast.

Severin’s Blu-Ray release looks fabulous and includes a fine audio commentary by Kat Ellinger.

So Sweet...So Perverse is highly recommended.

Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972)

Seven Blood-Stained Orchids is a 1972 crime thriller directed by Umberto Lenzi. It’s usually considered to be a giallo but it’s a bit more complicated than that. This was a West German-Italian co-production and the German company involved was Rialto Film. Rialto of course were responsible for the wonderful Edgar Wallace krimi cycle of the 60s and early 70s. That krimi cycle was a definite influence on the evolution of the giallo.

The two genres have a number of things in common, the most important being that both emphasised style over content. The plots tended to be fairly outrageous and plot coherence was not a major consideration in either genre. Seven Blood-Stained Orchids belongs to an intriguing group of early 70s movies that were in fact marketed in Germany as krimis, or krimi-giallo hybrids. It is however a genuine giallo.

The main source material for this movie was Cornell Woolrich’s novel Rendezvous in Black. For the German release the claim was made that it was also based partly on an Edgar Wallace story, but this was simply an attempt to boost the movie’s chances at the German box office. The closing opening sequence used in the Rialto krimis was also added to give the impression that this really was a krimi. Lenzi wasn’t pleased by this but it worked and the movie did very well in Germany.

A psycho killer is stalking women (a black-gloved killer naturally) . A half-moon amulet is left by the body of each victim so the psycho becomes known as the Half Moon Maniac. One of his victims, Giulia Torresi (Uschi Glas), has a lucky escape. She is married to fashion designer Mario Gerosa (Antonio Sabato).

There seems to be no obvious connection between the victims until it is discovered that a couple of years earlier they all stayed at the same hotel, the hotel owned at that time by Giulia’s family.

Inspector Vismara (Pier Paolo Capponi) has assigned plain-clothes officers to protect the other likely victims but the police just don’t seem to be able to get their act together and women get killed under their very noses.

Mario (fairly reasonably) comes to the conclusion that he can’t rely on the police so he decides to play private detective. As the killer accumulates more victims both Mario and the police always seem to be one step behind. Mario does go tantalisingly close to saving one victim, a woman confined in a mental hospital.

There is one promising clue, an American who used to eat regularly at the Torresi family’s hotel. And Mario comes across another clue - seven orchids all stained blood-red. But that clue seems to lead nowhere.

In desperation a trap is set for the killer, with slightly unexpected results.

There’s a very high body count and the murders are done in typical baroque giallo style (and several of them are quite impressive visual set-pieces).

There are false leads and plenty of deception. In two cases where the victim survives the police lead the murderer to think that those victims are dead. It was hardly an original idea to have the lead character decide to play private detective but in this film it makes sense. The police really do make a mess of things.

Lenzi considered this movie to be fairly clued and to some extent he was right. There are certainly clues that should awaken an alert viewer’s suspicions.

Antonio Sabato is not the most colourful or endearing of heroes. Marisa Mell has a small part which doesn’t give her any real opportunities. The supporting players are generally extremely good. The standout performance however is given by Uschi Glas. She has real screen presence and she makes Giulia a lively, likeable intelligent heroine.

The plot stretches credibility but if you’re watching a giallo and looking for plot coherence then you’ve picked the wrong genre. A giallo plot is not required to make sense or hang together and the more outrageous the plot the better.

Lenzi used to be better known for some of his notorious later movies (such as his cannibal movies) but his earlier giallos have since grown in reputation and it’s those giallos on which Lenzi should be judged as a director. And he was a fine giallo director. He made better giallos than this one (the wonderfully offbeat Spasmo is his masterpiece) but Seven Blood-Stained Orchids is still a very solid very entertaining effort. Highly recommended.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray release offers a lovely transfer, and offers both the Italian and English dubbed version. All Italian movies of this era post-dubbed so whether you watch the Italian or English version really doesn’t matter. There’s an audio commentary plus a couple of interview, the interview with Lenzi being a very worthwhile extra.