Actress Mara (Paola Tedesco) becomes the witness of a murder of a pharmacist
just by accident - she accidently just hears the killer's voice -, but leaves
the crime scene before the police arrives in order to escape questioning.
But as killer's do, this one has soon found her out, & even gets into
her appartment & tries to kill her but is chasd off by the neighbour's dog.
Head over heels (& can you blame her), Mara leaves her appartment &,
instead of now phoning the police, moves in with her boyfriend, sound engineer
Luca (Corrado Pani). & as coincidences do happen, Luca's neighbour Bozzi
(Fernando Cerulli) was a friend of the dead pharmacist & he has received
the same threatening phonecalls as this man & asks Luca to figure out what
they are: & in his capacity of sound engineer, Luca soon can identify
different sounds on the taped calls - an oven, a machine stomping, dogs
barking, human cries of pain (why Bozzi thinks that these sounds make up a
threatening phonecall is left at anybody's guess though).
Soon, Esmeralda (Bianca Toccafondi), a friend of Bozzi & the pharmacist,
is killed, apparently by the same man who also killed the pharmacist, &
Mara, when driving Bozzi's car, is brutally attacked by a person unknown but
can escape, & Bozzi thinks the attack was meant for him ... but instead of
finally alarming the police, both Mara & Bozzi think it best that
sound-engineer Luca should take up investigations - an idea that Bozzi will
eventually pay with his life, & Mara will have to endure one more attack,
too.
But Luca eventually comes up with some clues, namely a murder case against
Pasquale Ferrante (Franco Citti), where Esmeralda, Bozzi & the pharmacist
all were jurors & convicted him even though he claimed his innocence -
& in an interview with the erstwhile judge Luca learns that Ferrante has
actually broken out of jail ... & of course, contratry to the pßolice it
takes our sound engineer no time to find Ferrante (who was hiding at his wife's
place), but he also finds out Ferrante, as a lefthander, couldn't have
committed the crimes that were definitely done by a righthanded men.
So Luca has to dig deeper & comes up with the wartime past of Bozzi,
Esmeralda & the pharmacist, when the all collaborated with the regime &
betrayed some Jewish kids to the Nazis, who were then killed in a concentration
camp. & since Luca knows that the judge of the Ferrante-murder-case is
Jewish, he goes on & confronts him with his evidence & his suspicion
that the judge is the killer ... & the judge to a point even confirms his
suspicions - yes, his kids were those killed in the concentration camp &
yes he made the threatening phonecalls ...
But at the same time Mara is attacked by the killer at her appartment &
only just saved by Ferrante (who for some/bno reason is a good guy now), before
she & ferrante go to the judge's house too, where the real killer is
revealed as ... Marco (Paolo Malco), the judge's only surviving son &
scorned lover of Mara, who has put all his anger into exacting his revenge ...
Of course he is killed in the end.
Seen a pure whodunnits, the Italian giallos in general were not too
satisfying as too little care was usually put into the construction of the
story & too much was left to coincidence. Good giallos could however make
up for that by carefully created atmosphere, suspenseful storytelling &
inventive murder-scenes.
Il Gatto dagli Occhi di Giada however is not a good giallo. Both
narrative logic & plausibility are thrown out of the window early on, with
almost every twist & turn being caused by some coincidence, & clues
& characters thrown in rather at will, while the main character does do
nothing to keep up the suspense since he's never in any real danger, while the
attacks on main girl Mara are thrown in rather by chance & are usually not
or only unsatisfactorily resolved (one such scene ends with someone being
killed instead of her who has nothing to do whatsoever with the story, &
when in another scene Ferrante jumps out of the blue to save her, that's a
little much). That none of the actors is really good doesn't help too much
either.
All in all a trashy serial killer movie that turns out to be a
disappointment anyhow.
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