Bezenby Joe D'Amato gets a hard time for being a trashy director due to those porn films he made, but he often delved into other genres, and when he got them right, he often blew away the competition. This film, his official debut film (as he did a few Bava-style completion jobs for other directors) is a crazy mix of Gothic Horror and Giallo, and it's a beauty. Also, some people call it confusing, but it's not at all.At first we see brother Luciano Rossi lamenting the death of his sister Greta, plus we also get a flashback that shows that the relationship was a bit...er...intimate. Next thing you know, Greta's alive and getting involved in a carriage crash outside one of those huge mansions you get in 99% of these films. She's taken in by a sister and brother and examined by doctor Klaus Kinski. Now, Kinski is freaky enough looking, but when he leans over Greta all his veins stick out on his head, and he looks like a Klingon! I digress - Klaus finds a weird necklace on Greta, takes a pin and sticks it through her eyeball, and then leaves, thoughtful. Greta strangely shows no affects of having a pin shoved through her eye and sets her sights on bedding both the brother and the sister.Around this time it appears that Luciano Rossi is kicking about stalking a member of staff at the mansion who receives a very gory shotgun blast to the face. Yes, someone is out to kill everyone, but is it the creepy butler guy who is spying on everyone? Or the jealous sister, who tries to drown Greta in the bath, then beds her. It's not Klaus Kinski though, because he manages, using something on that weird necklace Greta had, to create a formula that can bring the dead back to life, which not only gets him killed by a mystery person, but also his assistant, and the poor corpse he brought back to life!I'll stop there with the plot, because what first appears to be a kind of period Giallo ends up being far more sinister. It's like Joe D'Amato thought the genre wasn't strange or gory enough, and packs the film with people with their guts or brains hanging out, others nailed to walls, having their faces slashed to ribbons, or having their eyeballs pulled out by a cat. Being Joe, he doesn't skimp on the sex either, as Greta gets it on with just about everybody. You also get two creepy actors for the price of one, with Kinski and Rossi getting their own space to roll their eyes and be weird. Giacomo Rossi-Stuart looks depressingly aged in this film for some reason.So once again Joe comes out on top like he did later in the post-apocalyptic genre with Endgame and 2020:Texas Gladiators, and the classic video nasty Anthropophagus. Maybe not so much with Ator The Fighting Eagle, which is a PG rated Conan rip-off that is great for all the wrong reasons.

Leofwine_draca Coming from the man noted for his gory video nasties and the endless amount of softcore and hardcore pornography later in his career, DEATH SMILES ON A MURDERER is a surprisingly tranquil, dream-like horror movie which is more in line with the superb Italian Gothic wave of the early 1960s than the gory giallo antics that the title suggests at. Joe D'Amato (or Aristide Massacessi as he is otherwise known) directs a horror film for the first time as well as handling the photography, so you know straight away that this is going to be beautifully shot, visually appealing viewing experience which makes full use of slow-motion and strange camera angles. The fragmented plot is told in segments and in flashback, with some of the events being pure fantasy, so viewers will no doubt struggle to try and make some sense of the almost circular storyline where there is no sense to be had. Instead, the concentration is on providing a number of memorable eerie sequences, all containing an ethereal atmosphere and highlighted by a truly astounding and haunting score from composer Berto Pisano.The lead is taken by the baby-faced Ewa Aulin, an object of lust who begins the movie as a corpse on a stone slab. Later revived by ancient magical means, Aulin turns into a ghost-like creature who proceeds to seduce a wife and her husband, scenes which fill out the expected sex quota of the movie. The jealous wife later bricks Aulin up behind a wall (heavy shades of Poe exist throughout the movie) but finds herself haunted at a ball by a masked figure in a gown, who goes on to commit a string of gory murders. But instead of sticking to the mind-numbing slice-and-dice routine of the '80s slasher movies, all of the murders are presented in imaginative and shocking ways - a shotgun blasts the face off an innocent serving girl in a horrible moment, a man is bloodily slashed to death with a straight-razor and even a cat becomes a weapon of death come the gruesome finale.As well as the strong production values, there are some fine performances to be had from the leading cast members Angela Bo and Giorgio Dolfin, as the husband and wife caught up in events they cannot possibly understand. Aulin is excellent as the woman who may or may not be a ghost and D'Amato successfully contrasts her beauty by cutting to a rotting, zombie-like face in some strong moments of horror. A top-billed Klaus Kinski turns up in a large cameo appearance as a sinister doctor also experimenting with raising the dead and inserts a needle into a girl's eye in one of the many memorable images in the film. Also on hand are Giacomo Rossi-Stuart (CRIMES OF THE BLACK CAT) as a potential victim, and sleazy Luciano Rossi (VIOLENT NAPLES) who actually gives the best performance in the movie as the incestuous hunchbacked stranger. At the end of the day, DEATH SMILES ON A MURDERER provides plenty of atmosphere, suspense and real moments of horror as well as fulfilling the resident sex-and-gore quota, and as such stands as a firm addition to the Italian Gothic cycle; flawed, but at (many) times brilliant.

a_baron In the 1960s, a series of low budget films known as Spaghetti Westerns emerged from Italy; Clint Eastwood starred in a number of these, most notably "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly". The 1970s saw horror films given the same treatment, and one or two of them were not bad. Sadly, this is neither number one nor number two.Set in 1909, "Death Smiles On A Murderer" begins with a fatal crash and what appears to be a rape, then it slows right down to a virtual crawl. There is a lot of background music, which is not a bad thing for a supermarket or an elevator, but not here.This film tries to be all things to all men – and women: Dr Frankenstein meets the zombies with a ghostly theme, detective novel, heck, there is even a hint of lesbian sex thrown in. Finally, it descends into silliness with a murder by what appears to be a supernatural cat, a scene that would have made Ed Wood cringe. It's an old story: jack of all trades, master of none.

jaibo This early D'Amato film bears some affinity to the work of Mario Bava, being a 19th Century Gothic horror long on style and atmosphere if short on coherence. The basic plot involves a brother who raises his sister from the dead (using an old Incan ritual) in order that she gets revenge on those who were responsible for her death; a number of gory murders ensues.D'Amato attacks the story is a very strange way, deliberately I would presume to emphasise the tale's strangeness and put the audience in a similar position of mystification as the characters find themselves under. This approach is not entirely successful, although the dizzying maze of Dutch angles, stalking and spying POV shots, extreme close-ups (especially of eyes) makes the film constantly compelling. Klaus Kinski gets star billing for what is essentially a bit part as a scientist in a sub-plot (which links with the Incan ritual) and his early demise is problematic, as his appearance and then disappearance have the stench of a red herring.The film seems to be an extended riff on the idea that human relationships are an unhealthy brew of thwarted desire, jealousy and rage. The most effective moments have the characters stalked by the dead sister, who turns from ravishing beauty to mouldering corpse from shot to shot. The party with masks and the idea that beauty can suddenly turn rotten lead me to suspect that the film is an unacknowledged inspiration for some scenes in Kubrick's The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut.The finale, with the dead sister being revealed as the old woman cohabiting with the detective, is half-hokum and half inspired derangement of time; like Nicholson's final Shining moment, frozen in a picture from the 1920s, this reveal suggests that the detective has been doomed timelessly to follow a case which is in some ways a re-enactment of is own marital relationship, a reflection of the deadly tortures which seemingly ordinary married people wish to enact on each other. The story bears some similarities to the work of Poe, and like D'Amato's Emanuelle's Revenge, it uses the images of immolation behind a wall from that storyteller's A Cask of Amontillado.