In short: The Girl in Room 2A (1974)

Original title: La casa della paura

Margaret (Daniela Giordano) has just been released from prison, where she was held a few weeks for some light drug related thing she says she didn’t do. In need of a new place to live, she ends up in the pension of Mrs Grant (Giovanna Galletti). The lady comes with one of those creepy/nice sons (Angelo Infanti) you usually get in movies with this sort of constellation. The good lady does tend to waver between the creepy and nice poles herself. Little does Margaret suspect that young women with a chequered past tend to disappear from the pension, or rather, from room 2A. Which just happens to be her new room. The viewer learns early on that these victims are tortured and killed by the cult of one Mr Dreese (Raf Vallone), whose ideas about Christianity make “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” look downright progressive. There’s also someone in a fetching red, hooded torturer outfit involved in this business.

Of course our heroine soon finds herself threatened by the cult; her only allies are the brilliantly named Alicia Songbird (Rosalba Neri) and the brother of one of her predecessors, Jack Whitman (John Scanlon).

I have no idea how occasional American sexploitation director William Rose (also billed as Warner Rose or Werner Rose, or as Bill Rose as a bit part actor) came to make this giallo in Italy, but I do congratulate him for adapting to the language of the genre very well. So there’s some comparatively stylish – this is still a lower rung giallo, so don’t expect Sergio Martino, and certainly not Argento – camera work and editing (though the latter can become a bit disjointed as often as it is inventive), with a couple of good if weirdly constructed suspense scene, as well as the expected dollop of sleaze and violence. Keeping to the same tradition, the plot only barely makes sense and is populated by a cast of characters who act shifty for no discernible reason, as if all of this took place in a world with slightly different – and more exciting – rules and values than those of our own. Brad Harris also pops in for a couple of scenes to hit some cultists in the face and break down a huge door, which probably goes to show that one should take care whose girlfriends one kidnaps, tortures and murders.

The Girl in Room 2A is certainly not a classic of the giallo, not even a minor one, but does belong to that part of the genre that’s fun to visit after one has spent time with the genuine classics, the semi-classics, and the outsider classics. It’s a comfy experience, if you’re of the proper mindset for it.