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To compose the score for his director friend Sandra's (Anny Papa)
horror film, Bruno (Andrea Occhipinti) rents a villa somewhere in the
country from his friend Tony (Michele Soavi) - only to realize quite soon
that some weird things are going on here, like two girls (Valeria Cavalli,
Fabiola Toledo)paying him a visit, talking about a certain Linda, and then
disappearing all of a sudden ... the audience knows of course they are
murdered, but Bruno is left guessing until the very end. Eventually,
Bruno and Sandra try to find out what is really going on, and Sandra
figures that Linda must be the same woman who gave her the inspiration for
his film - but before she can get more specific, she is murdered too, and
the final reel of the film, which should explain everything and which only
Linda has seen is destroyed. Ultimately, Linda strikes again,
killing Bruno's girlfriend (Lara Naszinsky) as well before Bruno can kill
her, making her run into her own knife - only to then find out that Linda
is not a she at all but his friend Tony, who after a traumatic childhood
experience feels the need to dress up as a woman every now and again and
kill some pretty girls. It's rather sad to see where the giallo
has gone since its heyday in the early to mid-1970's: Gone are the visual
excesses, replaced by TV-thriller aesthetics, and gone are inventive
murderscenes replaced by in-your-face slashings. What has remained from
the gialli of old is an overly constructed script, silly psychological
explanations, and several nods to Hitchcock's Psycho. All of this
does not make A Blade in the Dark a terrible film as such, just an
average, impersonal psycho thriller that takes less time to forget than it
takes to watch it - and that, I'm afraid to say, is not a terribly good
thing.
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