Death Smiles on a Murderer (1973)

People are voting emotionally.

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

There's a good chance the film will make you laugh out loud, but if it doesn't, there's an even better chance it will make you openly sob.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

D'Amato's directorial debut already incorporates his two major concerns – eroticism and gore; another element which, however, comes to the fore here (a pitfall of many a novice film-maker!) is an ostentatious approach to technique – with shots taken from any number of improbable angles! That said, the elliptical plot is nothing to scoff at either (indeed, whenever one thinks of having unraveled the mystery, another twist turns up to mystify the viewer, and this keeps up till the very last image!): to be fair, this was quite a bold move for a first feature and that is why, for all its faults, the film is not one to be easily ignored.Incidentally, the central theme of resurrection was what linked it with the Christopher Lee vehicle THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM (1967; with which it was actually paired on DVD); while Klaus Kinski's presence (and co-star billing) in this was basically its selling-point, he exits the picture before it is even half over! He plays a Frankenstein-like doctor called in at a country estate to nurse a carriage accident/amnesiac victim played by Ewa Aulin (after years of research, he conveniently discovers the life-restoring formula on the back of a medallion she wears!) but, while he spends minutes on end carefully preparing the potion, is killed off precisely at his moment of triumph!! As for the girl, she proves not quite the ingénue she at first appears (with a complicated back-story to boot!); seducing both the master and mistress of the house, she eventually drives the latter into a jealous fury which sees her walling up the still-living heroine in the basement! However, she re-appears as a vengeful wraith (with the girl's features occasionally reverting to her true decrepit state for horrific effect) with everybody who had in some way wronged her meeting all sorts of grisly demises (including her crazed and hunchbacked medical student brother – scratched to death by a cat in extreme close-up! – and the young aristocrat's doctor father Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, who had first impregnated the girl and then saw her die on the operating table!!).Berto Pisano's score, which mixes moody interludes with a terrific romantic theme, emerges as one of the film's definite assets. By the way, this was Aulin (who had shot to stardom with CANDY [1968])'s penultimate effort; since its follow-up – Jorge Grau's well-regarded BLOOD CEREMONY (1973) – proved to be in similar vein, I will also be checking that one out presently...

Bewitching amnesiac Greta (a truly beguiling portrayal by the adorable Ewa Aulin of "Candy" infamy) is given shelter by a rich young couple. Greta triggers the erotic attention of everyone she meets, which in turn sets off a grim series of gruesome and murderous events. Meanwhile, the sinister Dr. Sturges (the ever creepy Klaus Kinski making the most out of a regrettably brief role) discovers an ancient Incan formula for resurrecting the dead. Of course, Greta gets killed, but returns to life as a seductive avenging zombie. Director/co-writer Joe D'Amato does a fine job of ably creating and sustaining an extremely eerie and hypnotic dream-like atmosphere. The rather muddled and elliptical narrative enhances rather than detracts from this film's weirdly compelling gloom-doom mood while D'Amato manages to maintain a surprising elegance amid all the strangeness. Moreover, D'Amato further spices things up with lashings of nasty gore, a dab of tasty bare female skin, and a sprinkling of sizzling soft-core sex, plus we even get kinky elements of lesbianism, voyeurism, and necrophilia. The competent acting by a sturdy cast rates as another major asset, with sound work by Angela Bo as the smitten Eva von Ravensbruck, Sergio Doria as the dashing Walter von Ravensbrock, Attilio Dottesio as the puzzled Inspector Dannick, Fernando Cerulli as helpful eccentric Professor Kempte, and Carla Mancini as snoopy maid Gertrude. D'Amato's handsome widescreen cinematography gives the picture a sparkling bright look and offers plenty of lovely shots of the breathtaking verdant country scenery. Berto Pisano's neatly varied score alternates between the funky'n'brooding and more gentle and melodic. An offbeat and enjoyable curio.

This early D'Amato film bears some affinity to the work of Mario Bava, being a 19th Century Gothic horror long on style and atmosphere if short on coherence. The basic plot involves a brother who raises his sister from the dead (using an old Incan ritual) in order that she gets revenge on those who were responsible for her death; a number of gory murders ensues.D'Amato attacks the story is a very strange way, deliberately I would presume to emphasise the tale's strangeness and put the audience in a similar position of mystification as the characters find themselves under. This approach is not entirely successful, although the dizzying maze of Dutch angles, stalking and spying POV shots, extreme close-ups (especially of eyes) makes the film constantly compelling. Klaus Kinski gets star billing for what is essentially a bit part as a scientist in a sub-plot (which links with the Incan ritual) and his early demise is problematic, as his appearance and then disappearance have the stench of a red herring.The film seems to be an extended riff on the idea that human relationships are an unhealthy brew of thwarted desire, jealousy and rage. The most effective moments have the characters stalked by the dead sister, who turns from ravishing beauty to mouldering corpse from shot to shot. The party with masks and the idea that beauty can suddenly turn rotten lead me to suspect that the film is an unacknowledged inspiration for some scenes in Kubrick's The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut.The finale, with the dead sister being revealed as the old woman cohabiting with the detective, is half-hokum and half inspired derangement of time; like Nicholson's final Shining moment, frozen in a picture from the 1920s, this reveal suggests that the detective has been doomed timelessly to follow a case which is in some ways a re-enactment of is own marital relationship, a reflection of the deadly tortures which seemingly ordinary married people wish to enact on each other. The story bears some similarities to the work of Poe, and like D'Amato's Emanuelle's Revenge, it uses the images of immolation behind a wall from that storyteller's A Cask of Amontillado.

Death Smiles at Murder-Aristide Massaccesi (aka Joe D'Amato) This is not your typical D'Amato movie, if there is such a thing. There's graphic violence, a little gore, but nothing really over the top. But what this movie has, is a little style and maybe even ~~gasp~~ some class. It's very confusing, and includes everything from reanimation, to a three way love affair, to a murder mystery. The basic plot is about a young beautiful woman Greta, who shows up at a Villa and is involved in a horse carriage accident which impales the driver. A couple take her in since she has developed amnesia. There's a series of flashbacks that attempt to cast some Intel on who she is, but not why she is there. Klaus Kinski has a small role as the doctor who attends to her, but has a totally different agenda which deals with a concoction he's working on to bring back the dead. Soon the movie gets even more bizarre and even takes a little from Poe's "Black Cat". Everything looks pretty damn good in this movie, the sets, the actors, and the main thing I noticed is the main theme to the soundtrack is straight out of "Suspiria". In fact, you could pretty much say ~~stolen from Suspiria~~.Both the Husband and his Wife fall in love with Greta, and the Wife especially turns out to be rather jealous and walls up Greta in the dungeon. After that some even more bizarre happenings occurs resulting in the gruesome death of the Wife. But what happened to the walled up Greta? Well, that little chore is up to the local Police Inspector, and he hasn't got a clue as to what is going on, because Greta has vanished. This all culminates in a fairly good, if not confusing, ending that seems to put most of pieces back in order.