In Prague, a man is found dead and sent to the morgue. The coroner finds his passport and identifies the American journalist Gregory Moore (Jean Sorel).He finds strange his body temperature and the absence of rigor mortis. However, Gregory is alive and totally paralyzed and recalls all the previous events. Gregory works in Prague with the journalists Jessica (Ingrid Thulin), with whom he had a love affair, and Jacques Versain (Mario Adorf). He will be transferred to London and meets his girlfriend Mira Svoboda (Barbara Bach) to invite her to travel with him. They go to a party and then he returns to his apartment with Mira. However Jacques calls him to investigate the death of a minister. However the information is fake and when he returns to the apartment, he finds that Mira has gone missing. The inefficient Inspector Kierkoff (Piero Vida) is in charge of the investigation and Gregory finds that several young women have disappeared in Prague. He carries out his own investigation culminating to find a mysterious cult. Meanwhile his friend and doctor finds weird the condition of his corpse and tries to revive Gregory. Will he succeed?"La corta notte delle bambole di vetro", a.k.a. "Short Night of Glass Dolls", is a totally different giallo. The story has no gore and slightly recalls the idea of "Sunset Boulevard", where a dead man tells the previous series of events until his death, and "Rosemary's Baby" since there are many people involved in a satanic cult. The conclusion is excellent with no redemption. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "A Breve Noite das Bonecas de Vidro" ("The Short Night of the Glass Dolls")

One suspects that in the grey nomansland between horror and giallo round about 1970 Euro producers began to suspect that they could get an audience by just tossing in a nude scene on top of even the most boring movies. In the world market then Euro must have meant nudity and they went with it. This movie is definitely one of those most boring movies. Its told as a kind of flashback by a detective in a state of catatonia. I never could figure out what was going on, and the pace is glacial, unrelieved even by Thulin showing a nipple now and then. Great shots of I think it is Prague, but not much else. Someone in production must have detected this because at the end they toss in an orgy of old Satanists reducing what looked menacing in Rosemarys Baby to wincing awfulness plus stilted sexual activity lifted from either of the comically dated orgies in either Emmanuelle in New York or Around the World, take you pick they're basically the same, though there is nothing hardcore here. Then it turns out that the aquiline figure lording over the satanic doings is also a doctor and he gets in the way of the main male lead getting well I wont give it away. Movie has a great title which made me grab for it, but it vanished into the non movie category while it was being watched. Not recommended.

I had really high hopes for this new remaster from Blue Underground. In the last few months, I have become a big giallo fan. I've gained a real appreciation for the genre after viewing several."Short Night of the Glass Dolls" is without a doubt one of the most well-produced giallos I have seen to date. I think the budget was probably pretty large, compared to contemporaries. The cinematography is masterful and the soundtrack is amazing.Where this film fell short for me was the plot and continuity. I found myself getting bored throughout. There is no gore. The murders are minimal. The sex is tired. I just din't think it was all that interesting. I get the point of it: old people take advantage of the young in order to better themselves and their world. It will always be their world, they feed off the blood of the young...etc. The problem is, this isn't even alluded to until the very end of the film. It's also vague and the plot takes too many twists. I lost interest because so many things were never explained.Perhaps it would have been better viewed in Italian with subtitles. Maybe it was lost in the dubbing. (Which is good, compared to other Italian films.) Or maybe it was just the overly artsy feel, but somehow, it just failed to grab me. The last scene is pretty decent though. Does it make up for the slow pace? I guess it's up to the viewer to decide. If you can make it without falling asleep.6 out of 10, kids.

As far as I know, there exist only two films that are narrated by corpses telling their story from "the other side": the 1947 Bela Lugosi vehicle "Scared to Death," one of the world's worst, and Billy Wilder's 1950 offering, "Sunset Blvd.," one of the world's best. And then there's Aldo Lado's meaninglessly titled "Short Night of Glass Dolls" (1971), in which a man, only supposedly dead, lies in a morgue and thinks back on how he came to be there. It turns out that the semistiff is an American journalist named Greg Moore (sympathetically played by Jean Sorel), who had been working in Prague and dating a beautiful young local named Mira. When Mira mysteriously disappeared, Moore had entered into an investigation that soon broadened into an attempt to learn why so many other young women had recently vanished.... Featuring as it does only a small handful of virtually bloodless killings, "Short Night" hardly qualifies as a giallo--a mystery thriller would be a more apt description--but still has much to offer. Lado, in this, his first film, does a fine job (I much prefer this one over Lado's "Who Saw Her Die?" from 1972), and Ennio Morricone's waltzlike score for the film is at once somber, atmospheric and dreamlike. Prague itself is shown to be as gorgeous a city as you may have heard, and speaking of gorgeous, Barbara Bach, in her small role as Mira, is very appealing and not a little sexy. Ingrid Thulin, here playing a fellow journalist of Sorel, looks much less severe than I am used to seeing her in Bergman pictures; a pleasant surprise. The film ends very strangely, and its decidedly downbeat suggestion of evil triumphant should linger long in the memory. In truth, this is not a bad little picture at all, and beautifully captured on the Anchor Bay DVD that I just watched.