Director: Emilio P. Miraglia
Year: 1972
Country: Italy/West Germany
Alternate Titles: La dama rossa uccide sette volte; Cry of a Prostitute; Love Kills; Blood Feast; Feast of Flesh; The Lady in Red Kills Seven Times
Genre: Giallo
Plot:
After her grandfather dies, a woman and her sister find that their inheritance is the least of their worries as a long-standing family curse is said to be the cause of several deaths around them, forcing them to put their lives on hold to find the mysterious killer stalking their friends to enact the curse.
Review:
This was a fairly solid and enjoyable Gothic-tinged Giallo. One of the better elements present with this one is a generally appealing setup that mixes together some really intriguing features. The old-school Gothic touch here with the idea of duplicitous family members trying to keep family secrets and an inheritance to themselves while others try to pry into the whale affair is straight from that school just with a modern-day setting. That goes along rather well with the large, sprawling mansion where most of the first half of the film takes place where the stone structure and series of underground passageways make this feel quite at home in a Gothic landscape.
That goes a long way toward making the introduction of the killer into this setup feel rather engaging. The family legend at the heart of the main story here involving the murderous sister returning on a select anniversary to carry out a rampage before killing off the family members is a perfect Gothic stalwart which goes rather nicely with the majority of this one involving the fashion magazine. There’s plenty to like here as this one goes about inferring the rampage as a means of revenge in the midst of the murders disrupting their business practice that carries on the genre’s trademark sleaze and exploitation to a nice enough mark.
The final positive here comes from the solid and generally engaging death scenes. The killer wearing a red cloak adds a fine touch which helps to create a shock during the surprise ambushes like the park sequence, a gruesome incident at the house of one of the models’ and a tun abduction sequence where the victim enters a van driven by the killer unknowingly and is driven out to the countryside to be killed there. Other big attacks here all set the stage for the finale which is a rather exciting action scene involving a victim trapped in a flooding basement and must get out while avoiding a swarm of rats as others try to get them out which is all a part of what makes this fun.
There’s not much holding this down but it does have some drawbacks. The main issue here is the highly underwhelming reveal of the killer as this one comes slightly undone during this part of the film. Due to this one not really doing much to make the red herrings feel like anything more than window-dressing, the big reveal of the killer comes off as highly underwhelming and somewhat lame. As the last-minute reveal of the tragic background makes abundantly clear, keeping track of the various relationships with everyone is ultimately proven inconsequential which is really disheartening here. While not really detrimental, these factors do manage to bring it down somewhat.
Overview: ***.5/5
Captures quite a lot to like as a big giallo, this one has a lot to enjoy about it by combining the Gothic sensibilities with a modernized genre setup for a generally fun time. This is highly recommended to fans of the style or rae Eurohorror fanatics, while those who don’t appreciate those factors should heed caution with this one.
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