NINE GUESTS FOR A CRIME

Arthur Kennedy at the wheel 

NINE GUESTS FOR A CRIME (aka Nove espiti per un delitto/1977). Director: Ferdinando Baldi.

Liberto (Arthur Kennedy of Impulse) takes members of his family for a two-week vacation on his private island. His guests include his young, unfaithful wife, Giulia (Caroline Laurence), who only married him for his money; his sons Lorenzo (John Richardson of Torso) and Michele (Massimo Foschi); their wives Greta (Rita Silva) and Carla (Sofia Dionisio); psychic Patrizia (Loretta Persichetti); son-in-law Walter (Venantino Venantini); and Aunt Elisabetta (Dana Ghia). For the first few hours they spend their time on the island berating each other and cheating on their spouses. Then one of the members of the party drowns. A killer begins stalking the others, and Elisabetta talks hysterically of how her lover Charles was murdered and buried on the island twenty years before ... 

John Richardson

Nine Guests keeps you watching, but the film has absolutely no style and very little tension. Characterization only consists of people being bitchy with each other and talking about how much they all hate each other -- to say these people are unsympathetic is an understatement. The gore is minimal, and a severed head that tumbles off a bed looks just like the phony prop it is. Some of the murder scenes are actually comical, and when the killer is revealed you can't quite imagine that this particular person could be responsible for all of these deaths. 

Verdict: Mediocre giallo. **1/4.

TORSO

 

TORSO (1973/Italy). Director: Sergio Martino. 

While this Italian giallo film lacks the style, finesse and classy art direction of the best of Mario Bava and Dario Argento, it does manage to work up some suspense and chills in the final quarter. Young women are being stalked, murdered and dismembered in Rome. The suspects include a professor, a love-sick student, a handsome doctor, a co-ed's uncle, the "village idiot" and others. The heroine, Jane, (Suzy Kendall) retreats with three friends to a house in the country high atop a cliff, but finds she can not escape the killer. The movie begins inauspiciously and promises to be a pretty dull item, but it sustains interest until an excellent sequence when Jane hides from the maniac as he begins to dismember her friends. Later there is a very taut, chilling sequence when he goes through her room in search of her and nearly finds her. If the whole movie had been on the level of these tense scenes it really might have amounted to something. As it is, horror fans may find it worthwhile. The professor, Franz, is played by John Richardson, who co-starred with Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. (1967) and did little else of note. The script throws in a lesbian love-making scene for no apparent reason other than to presumably add some extra titillation. None of the killer's many victims, either male or female, ever seem to fight back. At one point he manages to dispatch three women (off-screen) at the same time! 

Verdict: Not great, but of interest to fans of psycho-shockers. **1/2.