'Your Vice Is a Locked Room, and only I have the Key' (1972) – Sergio Martino.

Along with the sinuously savage, blisteringly bellicose blood-spiller 'Torso', this divinely decadent grisly Gothic Giallo is the Martino title I return to most. The increasingly lurid activities that drunkenly take place within the vast crumbling confines of Oliviero's estate are certainly not for the faint of heart! A once grand ancestral home is now the drearily dilapidated diorama for dissolute writer Oliviero's increasingly sordid soirées, wherein this wholly corrupted intellectual's foul debaucheries include the almost ritualistic drunken humiliation of his long-suffering wife (Anita Strindberg) the ceaseless ignominy fatefully culminating in a series of especially gruesome murders that suggest the madly misanthropic wordsmith's nocturnal activities may have finally taken on an infinitely more disturbing bent! Cleverly appropriating the more macabre elements of Edgar Allan Poe's immortal tale of darkly sardonic terror 'The Black Cat', Martino's no less inviolate, gore-garlanded Giallo remains a scintillating, morbidly fascinating thriller in its own right, given additional lustre by a bravura performance by the monumentally talented character Luigi Pistilli as the diabolically degenerated dipsomaniac Olivieri, capably supported by gorgeously glamorous Giallo glamourpuss Anita Strindberg, and her bra-bustlingly buxom brunette co-star Edwige Fenech who were never more beguiling, with the sinfully statuesque, starkly hedonistic Edwige making for a most vigorously vulpine villainess! The terrifically twisted text by the estimable scrivener Ernesto Gastaldi is a spine-tingling triumph, and the film's feverishly creepy cornucopia of stylishly sinister set-pieces are sublimely synchronized to one of mood maestro Bruno Nicolai's most thrilling themes guarantees Martino's delirious Giallo masterpiece never ONCE loses its DEADLY black-gloved grip!

 

'Unlock your hidden vices in murder maestro Sergio Martino's deliriously decadent, gore-drenched Giallo!' - weirdlingwolf.