Master Italian filmmaker Mario Bava once again directs with plenty of style, giving spice to an amusing plot that prefigures the slasher film "He Knows You're Alone" by a decade.
The handsome Stephen Forsyth stars as John Harrington, the owner of a bridal shop. He's gone mad, yet still has the ability to reflect on his condition. He's married to a witchy woman, Mildred (Laura Betti) who refuses to divorce him, and is a haunted individual, living with a long ago trauma and witness to visions of himself as a child. This trauma now spurs him to murder his own models whenever they plan on getting married.
As we can see, this story isn't a matter of whodunit. We're with our killer every step of the way, aren't entirely unsympathetic to his condition, and wait to see how soon the cops will catch up to him. In the meantime, Bava does amazing things with colour and atmosphere, crafting a powerful visualization of his protagonists' deteriorating mind.
It takes until the second half for the movie to really kick into gear. Until then, it goes easy on the horror, with the murders parcelled out carefully and Bava making sure to cut away before things get very graphic. The second half gets effectively eerie, with the hallucinatory imagery really taking over as Johns' conscience starts to eat away at him. One wonderful sequence has the investigating detective (Jesus Puente) dropping in on John and interrogating him while the body of his most recent victim is still quite warm! (Bava fans will delight in seeing his earlier horror anthology "Black Sabbath" playing on TV during this sequence.) The music score by Sante Maria Romitelli is beautiful and haunting much of the time, yet gets appropriately discordant at certain points.
A capable cast makes the most of the material, no matter how poorly they may be dubbed. Forsyth is believable at all times, Dagmar Lassander is appealing as the newest model to be hired by the shop, Betti is a hoot as the icy wife, and Femi Benussi is easy to watch as one of the unfortunate murder victims. Fans of European genre films will also recognize Luciano Pigozzi and Gerard Tichy among the supporting players.
This isn't one of Bava's very best works (his period in the 1960s is when he really shone), but it's still pretty good of its type and deserves some respect and attention. If you're fan of Italian horror, it's well worth a look.
Seven out of 10.
The handsome Stephen Forsyth stars as John Harrington, the owner of a bridal shop. He's gone mad, yet still has the ability to reflect on his condition. He's married to a witchy woman, Mildred (Laura Betti) who refuses to divorce him, and is a haunted individual, living with a long ago trauma and witness to visions of himself as a child. This trauma now spurs him to murder his own models whenever they plan on getting married.
As we can see, this story isn't a matter of whodunit. We're with our killer every step of the way, aren't entirely unsympathetic to his condition, and wait to see how soon the cops will catch up to him. In the meantime, Bava does amazing things with colour and atmosphere, crafting a powerful visualization of his protagonists' deteriorating mind.
It takes until the second half for the movie to really kick into gear. Until then, it goes easy on the horror, with the murders parcelled out carefully and Bava making sure to cut away before things get very graphic. The second half gets effectively eerie, with the hallucinatory imagery really taking over as Johns' conscience starts to eat away at him. One wonderful sequence has the investigating detective (Jesus Puente) dropping in on John and interrogating him while the body of his most recent victim is still quite warm! (Bava fans will delight in seeing his earlier horror anthology "Black Sabbath" playing on TV during this sequence.) The music score by Sante Maria Romitelli is beautiful and haunting much of the time, yet gets appropriately discordant at certain points.
A capable cast makes the most of the material, no matter how poorly they may be dubbed. Forsyth is believable at all times, Dagmar Lassander is appealing as the newest model to be hired by the shop, Betti is a hoot as the icy wife, and Femi Benussi is easy to watch as one of the unfortunate murder victims. Fans of European genre films will also recognize Luciano Pigozzi and Gerard Tichy among the supporting players.
This isn't one of Bava's very best works (his period in the 1960s is when he really shone), but it's still pretty good of its type and deserves some respect and attention. If you're fan of Italian horror, it's well worth a look.
Seven out of 10.