A BLADE IN THE DARK

shot in two weeks on 16mm in producor Luciano Martino's house, A Blade In The Dark is an effectively bloody and interesting giallo. Andrea Occhipinti (New York Ripper, Conquest) is Bruno, a young film composer staying at a rented villa to score the really dumb movie of his female friend. soon strange women show up at the house, all seemingly related to the past tenant, and soon they all die horribly violent deaths.

to skip all the bullshit, we are treated to several shots of the killer, who is a "woman," but if you've seen more than two or three gialli you should realize it's obviously a guy in drag. in this case it's the real estate agent who rented out the villa, who was a man played by Michele Soavi, but is also "Linda" the past tenant who feels the need to dress like a woman because as a child he had to go down some dark stairs to get a tennis ball...uhhh, okay. anyway "Linda" finds out about the film, which was inspired by the horribly, life scaring traumatic event of going down some stairs to get a tennis ball, and "she" starts killing everyone involved with the film, so that no one will find out her terrible secret.

Blade has some of the most inventively bloody murder scenes in the whole giallo cannon...the best of which is the batroom murder wher a woman's hand is pinned to the sink with a butcher knife while her head is bashed into the sink. she's then draped over the tub and has her throat slit. this gore-tastic fun is followed by a delerious clean up scene, the killer crying/giggling while pulling tissue after tissue from the box, trrying to sop up all the blood.

the film works best during it's muder scenes (of course) and the long dialog-free scenes where Occhipinti searches the house, finding evidence of murder everywhere, but no bodies. a great scene, very simular to the scene at the library in Hard-Boiled, is when Occhipinti finds a misplaced knife in the kitchen and matches it up to a hole in the bathroom sink.

not a perfect film by a long shot. one of the main problems is the insane dialog. it's not bad in the typical sense of Italian films, but bad all the same. one example is the oft quoted "you're a female" part at the begining. well, it's not "you're a female" it's more like "FEMALE YOU ARE A FEMALE YOU ARE A FEMALE" in a high unnatural droning tone. then theres the scene where the woman pops out of the closet. she screams that she's scared of spiders, and we see a close up of a big black widow spider. then, Occhipinti says "don't worry, it's just a cockroach." he even mentions that it was a cockroach again later in the film.

another flaw, the fact that Guido and Muarizio De Angelis wrote a very lazy, lacklustre score for a film about a composer.

it is very evident that Lamberto was AD on Tenebre the previous year, as Blade has almost the exact same look and feel of Tenebre...in fact, the scene where the girl is being attacked outside by the pool by the exacto knife weilding killer look almost exactly like the scene in Tenebre where the young girl gets it with the axe.

even with a few flaws, i really enjoyed this film, and it will definately be rewatched.