Such a frustrating disappointment

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

This is often wrongly mislabelled as a giallo movie, thanks to the entirely gratuitous sex scene that opens the film. In it, a mysterious man (we never see his face) stalks a blonde woman (genre regular Karin Schubert) in her lingerie, gradually cutting off her clothing with a flick knife before he beds her. Anyone watching this will understandably think they're in for a sex-obsessed and entirely sleazy murder mystery, but then the camera pans back to reveal we're watching a show and the real film starts.This is a hostage thriller, set in a single location as a couple of people are trapped in a house with two violent killers. The premise has been done over and over again (as in the Bruce Willis flick HOSTAGE) but that's because it's such a filmable premise and easy to get right. The good news is that this film is a success, largely thanks to direction from Enzo G. Castellari. This Italian director was one of the biggest names in action cinema and as a result we get a film chock full of tense stand offs and brutal fist-fights, along with the stylish camera-work we know and love from this director.The script is intelligent and the various characters have believable machinations. Acting is spot on, with honours going to the American Frank Wolff as the shady copper who turns out to be the chief villain. Wolff brings equal parts humanity and equal parts villainy to his character and it's a barnstorming performance not to be trifled with. While Gianni Garko makes for an entirely unsympathetic hero – he's just too weedy and self-centred, the leading actress is easy on the eye and an equal force to be reckoned with. Heavyweight support is lent by the ever-good Fernando Rey and the film as a whole rips along, never boring or slow, always adding to the tension and suspense. The finale is perhaps unsurprisingly violent and brutal, but it works and provides a fitting coda to what is a very effective suspense flick.

Spanish, Italian co-production, set in London and already we are wondering if all will be well. We certainly get some strange accents and if this is giallo influenced, it is not drenched in the genre. What we don't get is lots of gore and nudity. On the plus side there is some Morricone soundtrack, great night shots of late 60's London and some unusually serious discussion of bribery and corruption in high places. Actually these suggestions of a totally corrupt judiciary might be references to Italy rather than England but hey.. There are some nice twists and if the piece is a little wordy it never stops being interesting as the characters change their stance and help to keep us on our toes. Meanwhile Fernando Rey spends the film sitting at his desk waiting for a bomb to go off, which it does and it doesn't!

An Eton-graduated lawyer, Peter Flower, meets an Italian prostitute, Anna, in a London nightclub, and goes to his uncle's house with her. But soon the house's butler, Hawking, is found dead, and a stranger named Quill shows himself with gun. And furthermore, the arrival of Arthur Welt sharpens the unstableness of the strange triangle of two men and one woman... I think this Italian-Spanish co-produced film, which is sometimes called cult one because of its eccentric visualisation of one character's confusion of fancy with reality, is not bad at all. It has no extraordinariness of the characters, but the each character he-or-her-self is the believable who wants to be concerned only with what he or she can assimilate to. And the story is not full of highly cinematic surprises but has something realistic and familiar, and it lacks the manifest combination of love and separateness but has of (in)security and class consciousness, and of learning and sexual warfare. Still one can point out the film has some over-stylised Italian cinema-graphical techniques and somehow stereotyped female character, Anna. Regarding the latter, one can think of various possibilities of the characteristic. For instance, it can be said Anna should not be a prostitute. If she is the lover or, in better setting, one of the lovers of Peter, then her influence upon him and/or his upon her can be much more complex and profound, and so forth. But the ongoing story of the film has cinematically advance hints, and even offhanded meeting of Anna and Peter, who are first and last strangers each other, has something latently important and therefore their otherness has its own meaning. The director/co-writer E.G.Castellari could do more than what really did, but what he did was, I think, cinematically sufficient.

This is an average example of the Italian Giallo, the story set in London, switching between a solicitor's office and his stately house, which is occupied by his solicitor nephew and a prostitute.The plot is fairly good, involving an elaborate revenge on the elder solicitor for a wrongful judgement some years earlier. This film has some good twists but is tense only at times. It seems to drag and much more could have been made of the frightful atmosphere in the house. Instead, we have over-used extreme close-ups and plenty of screaming and shouting.Not a bad film by any means, but there are plenty better examples of the genre.