'Solamente Nero' aka 'The Bloodstained Shadow' (1978) - Antonio Bido.

As time goes by, the talented, and greatly versatile director, Antonio Bido's films have become more readily available his exquisitely plotted, densely absorbing thrillers are all quite rightly being rigorously reappraised, no longer playing second banana to, Lenzi or Argento but deservedly being highly regarded as a sublime Gialli stylist in his own right! 'Solamente Nero' is a darkly insidious chiller, remaining one of the more memorable, deliciously unsettling Gialli, decorously framed against the magisterial decadence and ruinous beauty of the devilishly appealing grandeur of picturesque Venice.

Handsome, softly spoken, if a little neurotic, Professor Stefano (Lino Capoluccio) returns home to visit his ostensibly moral older brother, Don Paolo, the outwardly stalwart village priest, only to discover that the somnolent village, while aesthetically unaltered is not quite as restful as he had hoped, since a malefic deed from its far from unblemished history remains anything but dormant! Along with some increasingly seedy shenanigans and the murderous, anonymously note-writing blackmailer, Stefano and his distractingly nubile, artistically gifted love interest, Sandra (Stefania Casini) are very soon dangerously embroiled in a fervid nightmare that might fatefully prove to be uncomfortably closer to home than either of them might care to think about!

'The Bloodstained Shadow' is eerily immersive stuff right from the desperately disturbing, slo-mo hilltop slaying of the young schoolgirl until the thrillingly operatic, 'thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frighting' climax! Maestro moviemaker, Antonio Bido's polemical, sublimely visual Giallo has all the requisite, dramatically charged, beautifully refined celluloid ingredients to make it a superior work of sophisticated Italian genre cinema.

While lesser filmmakers rely all too frequently on hyperbolic gore, exploitative nudity and ostentatious camera pyrotechnics to maintain interest, the talented storyteller, Bido wickedly weaves his lurid tapestry of fulminating intrigue with remarkable fluency, ably assisted by, Mario Vulpiani's beautiful photography and an especially captivating score by the legendary, Stelvio Cipriani, whose elegiac themes are certainly no less of a beguiling star than the fascinatingly doomy Venetian locations. With two attractive leads, an engagingly labyrinthine, deliciously melodramatic Gothic narrative, this conspicuously classy, late 70s Giallo from an idiosyncratic master craftsman of sinister celluloid entertainingly still casts a long, enveloping, enigmatically eerie shadow of fear!

'Bido's darkly compelling Giallo still casts a long, sinisterly enveloping, enigmatically eerie shadow of fear!' - Weirdlingwolf.