Audience Member
It is overall suspenseful and has some nicely photographed scenes but is brought down by the slow pacing and general overacting.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
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Audience Member
A little choppy and occasionally hard to follow (and this is the dubbed version) but mostly enjoyable and good older movie. The actress was very like able too.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/22/23
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Audience Member
The Girl Who Knew Too Much is undoubtedly great. It's enlivened by the fine performances from the two leads and is absolutely brimming with style and energy. The gag at the end is in-keeping with Bava's work, but certainly doesn't lessen the impact of the more thrilling scenes that came before, or the air of grand mystery and excitement suggested by his excellent approach to editing, cinematography and design.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/10/23
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Audience Member
I've always figured that Mario Bava is a better filmmaker when he's working with the ambiguous and the atmospherically fantastical. He's decent when it comes to your typical murder mysteries, fine - but an artist of his optically giving renown is put to finer use when topics at hand revolve around planets comprised of vampiric beasts or underworlds where well-dressed supercriminals with a soft spot for leather catsuits run amok. So lush is his eye that necessary are storylines as untamed and as lustrous as his artistic discrepancies are.
Maybe it's obvious that I'm not as partial toward his more conventional works a la "Blood and Black Lace" and "Bay of Blood" - he's much too interesting an auteur to be spending his time doing what Dario Argento arguably does better. So aside from its indefinite standing as the very first giallo film ever made, I can't say that I'm that big a fan of his black-and-white stalk-and-slash thriller "The Girl Who Knew Too Much"; take away its thickly layered coffee-stained ambience and you have uninspired knockoff Agatha Christie that pulls no punches.
I'd like to like it more because I adore Bava so immensely, but a horror flick that looks gorgeous but feels rather dead-eyed cannot work for the length of your standard feature. It stars the sphinx eyed Letícia Román as Nora, an American in Rome visiting her sickly aunt. Because odds aren't usually in the favor of pretty young things visiting their dying aunts in foreign countries, the latter passes shortly after Nora's arrival. En route to the hospital to break the news to the family doctor, though, the young woman is mugged and knocked unconscious by a hoodlum.
Such is bad enough as it is, but matters are worsened when she wakes up and notices a man pulling a knife out of a dead woman's body near her. Inevitably, she reports this to the authorities, but because traumatized people are rarely given the benefit of the doubt in horror movies, her recollections are put aside and she's sent on her way.
But later does it become clear that the death could quite possibly be connected to the recent murders on the part of the "Alphabet Killer," a madman with a habit of offing people based on the order of their surnames. Naturally, Nora becomes an unwitting investigator, if only because she comes to realize that she could very well become the next victim herself.
So "The Girl Who Knew Too Much" is Nancy Drew lite, maybe, with touches of 1940s Hitchcock making the rounds, but since the whodunit at the center is more by the book than suspense ridden, it's a rather limp film (though Bava's luxuriant visuals provide some life that at least makes everything rich in scope). It was the last of the filmmaker's movies to be shot in black-and-white, and it's an eyeful of a cinematographic swan song, all murky shadows and nightmarish undertows. But other than its artistic output, "The Girl Who Knew Too Much" is skippable; for Bava's best, look in the direction of "Black Sabbath" or of "Kill, Baby, Kill."
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/03/23
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Audience Member
Simple but stylish, The Girl Who Knew Too Much is Mario Bava's thriller that would set the terms of the giallo subgenre. Using Italy's gorgeous landmarks, tossing in some murders, mystery, and romance, this one was entertaining if a little basic. It would go on to inspire many other stylish thrillers.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/05/23
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Audience Member
This is the story of a vacation.
Nora is a tourist in Rome who witnesses a serial killer executing his latest victim. The police use her as a carrot to dangle for the serial killer to strike again. She does become the target of the serial killer but can the police keep Nora safe. Some vacation.
"There was a man with a big knife and he stabbed her."
Mario Bavo, director of A Bay of Blood; Black Sunday; 5 Dolls for an August Moon; Roy Colt and the Winchester Jack; Kill Baby, Kill; and Black Sabbath, delivers The Girl Who Knew Too Much. The storyline for this picture is interesting and eerie. The acting was better than I thought and the cast includes Leticia Roman, John Saxon, and Valentina Cortese.
"I'm doing night watch with a man who has insomnia."
I came across this on Netflix and decided to give it a shot. I thought it was okay and had some cool elements. I liked Nora's character a lot. Overall, this is worth seeing if you're a fan of the horror genre. There are a large number of Mario Bavo movies on Netflix so I'll give them a shot based on the quality of this.
"She was bleeding. There was blood all over."
Grade: C
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
01/19/23
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