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The title, with its evocation of Rimbaud's "folie qu'on enferme," ideally epitomizes the giallo sense of carnal peril. Faddish revels and eternal cruelties, a hippie soiree at the Gothic villa where the blocked novelist (Luigi Pistilli) broods over his departed Mama, "it happens a lot with Italians." His wife (Anita Strindberg) endures the abuse, including a black cat named Satan that prowls around her pet doves and that might be her mother-in-law reincarnated. A slew of slain local maidens further frays the marriage, "a bad writer but a good sadistic murderer" becomes an alarming possibility in the heroine's mind. Enter the lout's elegantly libidinous niece (Edwige Fenech), and Sergio Martino's barbed transposition of Clouzot's Les Diaboliques to bucolic Teolo is in full swing. The late thespian's medieval costume, fondled before a mirror only to be slashed by the gleaming razor. "I'm definitely not Mary Stuart, but then you don't have Lord Leicester's face." The platinum puttana perishes in her bedroom among staring dolls, the inspector shrugs off the suspect's baleful demeanor as intellectual pessimism, moral duties fall to the elderly rag picker. Quite the abstruse Poe, incestuous romping and dirt bike racing are added but it still all comes down to the corpse in the cellar filtered through the carved feline eye. "I can't carry on being stuck between a neurotic and an erotomaniac!" Clattering typewriters and meowing echoes, blood bright like nail polish splashed on staircases and billboards. Losey's The Romantic Englishwoman is unexpectedly akin, and Kubrick also takes notice in The Shining. "Disgusting? It's a matter of taste..." With Ivan Rassimov, Riccardo Salvino, Angela La Vorgna, Daniela Giordano, Franco Nebbia, Enrica Bonaccorti, and Nerina Montagnani.
--- Fernando F. Croce |