The American archeologist Arthur Barnard (John Saxon in a tiny cameo) is on an expedition in the wilds of Italy. He's searching for an unopened Etruscan tomb that supposedly contains an unimaginable treasure.
He even finds what he is looking for, the trouble is that he's murdered in old Etruscan sacrificial style just as he is telling his wife about it on the phone.
His wife Joan (Elvire Audray) has had nightmares and visions about Etruscan rites as well as about the death of her husband (and also about a lot of maggots, charmingly) for some time. A combination of this, her dubious intelligence and some very ineffective persuasion attempts by her stinking rich father not to fly to Italy can obviously only lead to her flying to Italy at once. At least her friend Mike (Paolo Malco) accompanies her, and he will turn out to be indespensible when our heroine stumbles from one bad situation into the next into bouts of hysteria.
I admit that the script doesn't make her life any easier - she not only turns out to be the reincarnation of an Etruscan semi-goddess, but also stumbles into a quite nonsensical (the script is by Sacchetti and Gastaldi who have a reputation to hold up) web of drug-smuggling, tomb raiding and just plain killing.
I may be something of an admirer of Scorpion with Two Tails' director Sergio Martino, still I have to admit that this isn't one of his stronger efforts.
A lot of the problems the film shows are certainly caused by its nature as an Italian TV movie. The film's budget must have been quite constrained (I shudder to think of a production that can afford John Saxon only for one day, as is obviously the case here), so Martino's usual slick visuals aren't as hypnotic as I am used to. The violence also has to take some steps into a more casual-friendly direction, which shouldn't be that much of a problem for someone as technically excellent as Martino, but turns out to be a major stumbling block nonetheless. It looks like Martino didn't have the time or the imagination to think of a better substitute for blood than lots and lots of maggots.
Fortunately there are enough well-staged and interestingly filmed scenes to keep the jaded viewer with a healthy interest in the giallo watching.
And those scenes are bitterly needed: I'm willing and able to cut the acting in these films a lot of slack, but Elvire Audray's performance as our very blonde heroine is just atrocious. In fact, she is so bad that she's standing out in an ensemble of actors who at best look too bored to even try and at their worst seem to be simply unable to emote. John Saxon's cameo is nice enough, but does not help to make the rest of the cast any more believable. The abysmal quality (again keeping in mind the usual standards of Italian dubs) of the dubbing certainly is no help at all.
The script is the usual nonsense one expects from supernaturally spiced up giallos with most of the plot just a thin excuse to get the characters from one set piece to the next, which is perfectly alright in this kind of production if you don't watch movies only for the plot - in that case, you're beyond help anyway.
The ending even contains two very nice pieces of "what the fuck!?" I am not going to spoil here. Let's just say they are the kind of non sequiturs that can let me fall in love with bad movies all over again.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment