Mildly diverting giallo-by-the-numbers
9 July 2006
I wasn't expecting too much from this minor giallo. The Spanish director, Juan Bosch, was responsible for what was probably Paul Naschy's worst movie, "Exorcismo" (the one that ends with the Spanish horror star battling a possessed German shepherd). And the lead, English actress Gillian Hills, is most well-known for a couple of famous three-way sex scenes--with Jane Birkin and David Hemmings in "Blow Up" and with Malcolm McDowell and some other girl in "A Clockwork Orange". She had a slightly meatier role in the Hammer film "Demons of the Mind", but nothing to indicate she could carry a movie by herself.

Hills plays a young woman whose boyfriend disappears (we apparently see him killed in the opening scene). She has to rent out a room in her flat to a creepy tenant. She then gets a call from her missing boyfriend luring her to an abandoned airport hanger where she is nearly shot. She returns to find the creepy tenant has apparently committed suicide. But then she finds out he was an impostor when the real tenant shows up. And what's up with her boyfriend? Is he alive or dead? This is a pretty average giallo, but that means if you like gialli in general you'll probably like it. It seems relatively big-budgeted, being shot largely on location in London, but the visual style is not terribly interesting (with the exception of Hills' extended nude scene --it's pretty hard to make that uninteresting). I'd recommend it to gialli fans for sure (even though you really won't see anything you haven't seen before), and for everyone else, well, it's at least worth watching if you stumble across it I guess.
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