I was looking for another Sylva Koscina movie to watch last night and stumbled across a Giallo she did that I had never seen. So Sweet, So Dead turned out to be a rather predictable, but highly enjoyable film. The set-up is straight out of the Giallo playbook – a masked, gloved killer is butchering beautiful women. Each of the women is involved in an extramarital affair. The killer leaves pictures of the women with their lovers at the scene of each murder. The police, led by Inspector Capuana (Farley Granger), are baffled. I wrote that So Sweet, So dead was predictable. That's to say there's not a lot of originality to the movie. The masked killer, the beautiful women, and the knife to the throat are standard fare in most any Giallo. Until the very end, the movie plays it reasonably straight without a lot of the plot twists and turns found in a lot of other Gialli. That all changes, however, in the last 10 minutes. The plot twist at the end is incredibly dramatic and left me with an uneasy, cold feeling. It completely caught me off guard. The twist was really a nice turn of events. I also want to give director Roberto Bianchi Montero (unknown to me) extra credit for creating atmosphere. For a movie like So Sweet, So Dead to be effective, you have to have atmosphere. Montero expertly ramps up the tension just prior to each kill. Nicely done.The cast is especially strong. Granger is very good. I've always found him underrated in any movie of his I've seen. Koscina is as delightful as ever. I only wish she had played a more prominent role in more of the movie. There are a lot of gorgeous women rounding out the cast, including a brief, but welcome performance from genre fav Susan Scott. I say "brief" because she shows up, has sex, and promptly gets killed. Not a lot of screen time in this one for her.

This is yet another giallo helmed by a little-known director; the suggestive but actually deceptive original title, which translates to REVELATIONS OF A SEX MANIAC TO THE CHIEF OF THE MOBILE SQUAD, would lead one to believe that this is very low-brow stuff indeed – however, the end result (propelled by a pounding Giorgio Gaslini score) is not bad at all. Besides, there is a good cast on hand: the obligatory American 'star' is once again Farley Granger (looking remarkably more mature than in SOMETHING IS CREEPING IN THE DARK [1971]), but then we have what can best be described as cameos by "Euro-Cult" regular Silvano Tranquilli and three of its luscious starlets – Sylva Koscina (playing Granger's wife), Femi Benussi and Susan Scott; all the females are made to shed their clothes, with the latter two even involved in surprisingly explicit sex scenes! Incidenatlly, along with STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER (1975; also with Benussi), this was the most erotically-oriented genre effort I have watched so far; in fact, the movie under review was subsequently re-assembled and distributed as outright hard-core material under the moniker PENETRATIONS (but Granger understandably – and successfully – sued the producers over it)! The plot sees the traditional black-gloved killer targeting a small town's apparently unending population of cheating wives (leaving as calling-card photos of them caught in flagrante, albeit with their respective partners' face clinically erased); in this respect, it also emerges as one of the more moralistic giallo entries (at least, this time around one is spared the usual pursuit of the proceeds of either an inheritance or an insurance policy!). By the way, the film even foregoes the last-minute explanation of the killer's motives which concludes (unsatisfactorily) many a giallo – though, in view of just this unexpected striving for satirical relevance (which proves rather vapid nevertheless, given the sheerly exploitative elements by which it is surrounded), here was perhaps a case where one would have liked to know what made this particular person tick (a gratuitously deranged morgue attendant had been made to fit the bill all along, but the real culprit was not too far off the mark anyway)!!

Recently appointed Homicide detective, Inspector Capuana(Farley Granger)must uncover the identity of a serial killer who preys upon the adulterous bourgeoisie wives of High Society prominent city figures. The "sex maniac"(..he doesn't sexually molest his victims, but murders them because of their whoring ways)leaves photographs at the scene of the crime containing the victim with her lover in the act of passion. The very intelligent killer wears a stocking over his face, fedora hat, coat, black leather gloves, and uses a knife to stab his victims multiple times in a vicious, cold-blooded manner as they seek help, finding no one. Capuana is put in a corner by his superiors because he is not allowed to question the husbands of those killed, yet comes under scrutiny from the press in his difficulty catching the fiend. Paolo Santangeli(Silvano Tranquilli)is a very successful attorney with many affluent clients whose daughter sees the killer murder his lover(..and next door neighbor whose husband, after attempting suicide, is an impotent cripple).Solid casting of Granger adds quality to this ultra-sleazy giallo(..if you're looking for a giallo that doesn't skimp on the nudity, SO SWEET..SO DEAD is just right for you)with a really powerful conclusion(..it concerns Capuana himself and a sad, startling discovery really packs an emotional wallop;equally shocking is Capuana's decision not to help a victim in need). What I found truly amusing was how practically all married women were screwing around with a man behind their husband's back(..although, in Paolo's case, he and his wife, Franca, played by Annabelle Incontrera, both have open affairs with other people). Basically this film features bored, beautiful, glamorous women playing hanky panky while their hubbies are away on business. A minor problem that rather nagged me a bit was the inclusion of a sub-plot that is left unattended..Paolo's daughter, Bettina(Angela Covello)and her boyfriend Piero(Fabrizio Moresco)are featured, with her witnessing the murderer at work, seemingly a major development which will have the girl in mortal terror, only for it to be abandoned later altogether. Some of the most curvy, attractive, gorgeous European women you'll see in a giallo, parade(..without shame)around nude, stripping from their elegant wardrobes, without any inhibitions. Particularly tasty is Nieves Navarro as Lilly(Paolo's lover), Sylva Koscina(..as Capuana's wife), and Krista Nell as Renata(..a victim who attempts to escape up a spiral staircase, soon trapped and stabbed).Chris Avram is Professor Casali, a coroner(..and Capuana's confident)working with the police. Luciano Rossi is Casali's assistant, Gastone, a real weirdo who takes nude photographs of his dead ladies once his work is completed.

"The Slasher" has a pedestrian plot of multiple murders of beautiful married women who cheat on their husbands. Not only is the lovingly rendered pictorial dwelling on their naked bodies both before and after death disturbingly unnecessary, this distasteful film's message seems to be that women who are unmarried can be acceptably promiscuous. However, once they are married and continue to be promiscuous they deserve death. Not so the husbands, whether condoning it or ignorant of it. They can have as many affairs as they want without any disapproval. What decadent hogwash! The sole redeeming feature of this film is the chance to see expatriate Farley Granger in a lead role at 47, and he looks good, even with the mustache. Unfortunately he's way too expressive for the one-note role he's given here. A year later, he looks even better in the comedy thriller "Arnold" in which he ironically gets bumped off in a nude shower scene in an odd reversal of "Psycho" ."