Year: 1969
Duration: 01:21:57
Directed by: Harald Philipp
Actors: Dean Reed, Fabio Testi, Ini Assmann
Language: English
Country: West Germany | Italy
Also known as: Hard Women, Blonde Köder für den Mörder, Death Knocks Twice, La mort sonne deux fois, La mort sonne toujours deux fois, Sta dihtya mias gynaikas, La morte bussa due volte, Blonde Lokvogel voor een Moordenaar, The Blonde Connection
Description:
This is an early gialli (pre-“Bird with Crystal Plumage”)and is thus neither as violent, sexually graphic, or visually stylish as some of the later ones, but it’s worth seeing for fans of the giallo genre.
This movie has a lot going for it. The great Fabio Testi plays a deranged artist who can’t seem to resist strangling his female partners during sex. The voluptuous Anita Ekberg (the fountain-bather in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita”) is an older, married female art dealer who just can’t resist Testi’s possibly homicidal charms and becomes the potential victim of an elaborate murder plot. The villainous Adolf Celli plays her oft-cuckolded husband, a scary gangster called “The Professor”. Even a young Femi Benussi gets into the act in one of her earliest have-naked-sex-and-get-brutally-murdered-minutes-later cameos.
Unfortunately, the lead, American actor Dean Reed, is about as charisma-free as they come. Part of it his character, a private detective who callously uses his faithful fiancée as bait to snare the dangerous, sex-crazed artist. I was hoping something would happen–that she would cheat on him with Testi at the very least, but she is unaccountably loyal to this idiot. Even stranger, the detective at one point befriends a vicious dog belonging to another character, and the dog later rescues him at a crucial point (what is this–“Lassie”?). What either the dog or the girl see in this guy is beyond me.
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