Saturday, February 16, 2013

An executioner without judge and jury













Antonio Bido is a lesser known name amongst the giallo directors, mostly because did this movie, his first feature film, in the late 70's when the whole genre was starting to fade after it's glory days. That doesn't make him a bad director, on the contrary, for a first film this is absolutely brilliant. He has the giallo style well in hand and the music choices to boost it, hell even Dario Argento would be proud of some of the scenes in this movie. The plot goes something like this, Lukas (Corrado Pani) gets mixed up in a murder mystery when his girlfriend (Paola Tedesco) sees a murderer leave a crime scene. Someone seems to be after his neighbor as well and it looks like these two cases might be connected as someone seems to be after the jury members of a certain court trial. The story isn't half bad, sure there are some idiotic parts in it as usual, but it manages to stay quite interesting all the way to the end. I really loved the music in this one, especially how it's used, the operatic twist in the bathtub scene was pure brilliance. The cinematography is quite nice as well, not the most stylistic from the genre, but still some shots looked great. The biggest problem in this movie is the pacing, even though the first murder happens before the titles, it takes it's time to get started. But luckily towards the end it picked up quite nicely. Even though this movie had most of the things right for a giallo, I was still left hoping for more, apart from a few scenes it looked a bit too familiar. But it's still a good movie and well worth watching.
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