I wasn't expecting much from this early effort by Italian rip-off artist and Argento/Bava-worshipper "Lewis Coates" (aka Luigi Cozzi), but I was pleasantly surprised. Like most Italian product of the era it has great music and cinematography, but it is also impressively edited, well-paced, suspenseful, and most amazing of all, has a plot that more or less makes sense (something almost unheard of in the Italian suspense genre). And what a great collection of European b-movie talent. La deliciosa 70's Spanish actress Cristina Galbo is the very appealing female lead, and most of the rest of the cast is made up of great Italian character actors as you've always seen them before: George Hilton as suave schemer who has his rich wife murdered, Michael Antoine as the truly creepy and sadistic killer, and Femi Benussi as the dumb, blonde, and badly-dubbed sexpot who winds up completely naked minutes after first appearing on screen and dead by the end. The only downside to this movie is the lousy full-screen transfer and atrocious English dubbing. Maybe Anchor Bay or somebody will one day rescue this film from gray-market oblivion and give it the wide-screen, subtitled release it deserves.
