In short: The Intruder (1975)

A cameoing Mickey Rooney ships of a boatload of rich (one supposes) assholes to an island far away from the mainland. These guys and gals (among them director Chris Robinson and an Yvonne De Carlo whose character isn’t long for this world, because she has TV movies to shoot) have come to look for gold a dead relative may or may not have stashed there, lured in by a letter from one of that relatives' associates and the hope for tax-free gold.

When they arrive, said associate doesn’t show, as is always the case in films like this. Also not atypical is the fact that a shadowy, huge figure starts murdering his way through the cast.

It seems pretty clear to me that Chris Robinson’s The Intruder is an attempt at making an American version of that subset of the Italian giallo concerned with nastier and sexier variations on the Agatha Christie model of the mystery novel. “And Then There Were None” never seems far away from these films.

Alas, Robinson’s project suffers from some rather heavy flaws. Notably, where an Italian movie would garb a cast of mostly hot young things into ridiculous yet kinda awesome fashion, put on some Morricone and let everyone be murdered in front of sexy interiors while coloured lighting and various camera tricks create a groovy or even dreamlike atmosphere, here a cast of mostly ugly, mostly middle-aged, mostly overweight people wearing ugly stuff get murdered in front of brown and grey walls, while the camera does little of interest.

The film also lacks the always entertaining cynical sneering at the rich and hot of the Italian originals. The characters here simply never do anything decadent or interesting. But then, while you’d usually not go around accusing giallos of deep characterisation, they do know how to draw vile characters in shorthand, where The Intruder not even manages to explain how its cast is actually related to one another, or what they are doing with their time when they are not getting murdered.


From time to time, Robinson does get around to a shot or two of visual interest but that still leaves us with an 87 minute movie that manages to make ten or so murders feel like a chore.