Good title; too bad about the movie
14 April 2011
I generally love gialli, and the co-star of this one, Italian actress Erika Blanc ("The Devil's Nightmare", "Kill,Baby, Kill"), was probably one of the sexiest actresses of her era. It is amazing therefore just how bad this movie is. A young business executive (Peter Lee Lawrence) falls in love with a young woman (Erica Blanc) with whom he has a "meet-cute" encounter and whirlwind romance that I think even an ardent fan of "rom-com" "chick flicks" would find nauseating and implausible. After he returns from a trip, his shady father, who owns the company, shows him a news article reporting that his true love has apparently died in an accident. His terrible grieving is only interrupted by him bedding and subsequently wedding his father's sexy secretary (Ivana Novak). Then he sees a girl who looks just like his dead love and the movie basically turns into "Vertigo"--that is if "Vertigo" made no sense whatsoever and pretty much sucked.

Peter Lee Lawrence, an ill-fated German actor (who was romantically linked to Blanc in real-life, as well as to Spanish beauty Cristina Galbo, but ended up taking his own life) appeared mostly in spaghetti Westerns and crime thrillers where he was always best as a villain or anti-hero. He is pretty good, for instance, in "Long Arm of the Godfather" (also with Blanc) as a vicious gangster taking on his mob bosses. He's not nearly as good as a sappy hero (but then who is?). Blanc is wasted as an actress (and is absent half the movie). She also has only one shadowy nude scene (along with several cliché shots of Lawrence picking her up and spinning her around in her impossibly short mini-skirts while horrible romantic "music" swells). Most of the nudity quotient is left to Novak, who also appeared with Blanc in "The Devil's Nightmare" (she is the other girl in the lesbian scene with Shirley Corrigan).

I know nothing about the director Pelligrini, but if this boring nonsense is any indication of his work, I hope he didn't go on to direct too many more movies. I do actually really like the title, but too bad about the movie they made to go along with it.
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