 Next!
Watched this yesterday, and was very impressed. I had just watched (again) 'You're Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key' which I remembered as being a bit slow to start, but ultimately good. I am very pleased to announce that this is really quite a bit better.
I seem to have watched a lot of Martino gialli backwards - starting off with 'Torso' and a couple of other later ones, and up until recently my favourite by him had been 'All the Colours of the Dark'. I think I can now safely say that 'The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh' is the new favourite, and I am sure it will outlast the shock of the new. The story unfolds a little bit slowly, and to be fair - this is one of the early gialli - it does watch rather like a typical, if not amazing film, at the start. Then it sort of swoops into action with scene after scene of highly memorable cinematography and actually surprising plot twists.
I was also impressed by just how many other gialli have taken massive chunks from this film - the most obvious being the stalk in the park that Argento liifted (to, I must say superior effect) in 'Four Flies on Grey Velvet'. The attack in the underground carpark is almost repeated shot for shot by Aldo Lado (?) in 'What Have They Done to your Daughters', with even the starlet of that film being a bit of a Edwige Fenech xerox! It is, indeed, really interesting to see such a substantial giallo for the first time, and detect how influential it has been - both at the time, and still now.
I think this, teamed with 'Footprints' and 'Late Night Trains', is amongst the best things Shameless have released so far... look forward to 'Almost Human' as well.
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