Audience Member
Henry Silva is 92 years old and if life works out the right way, he'll outlive us all. He was so good as a student at the Actor's Studio that when they did A Hatful of Rain, he made it to the Broadway play and the movie.
Yet amongst folks like you and me, we know Silva from showing up as mobsters, killers and general scumbags in all manner of movies from so many countries. He had his first lead in 1963's Johnny Cool, killing off so many bigger actors, like Mort Sahl, Telly Savalas, Jim Backus, Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis, Jr. before Elizabeth Montgomery sells him out. But by November of that year, the President was dead and no one wanted to see a dark film noir.
In 1965, Italy came calling and Silva took a chance. He moved his entire family there and launched a career of playing, well, more horrible people. The next year, The Hills Run Red made him a star in Spain, Italy, Germany and France. And by 1977, he'd been in twenty-five movies. Stuff like Almost Human, gritty gangster versus cops films that audiences loved.
Silva made movies in Hong Kong (Operation: Foxbat), Japan (Virus), Australia (Thirst), Spain (Day of the Assassin), Canada (Trapped), France (La Marginal) and for TV (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century). He's the kind of guy who can be in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai just as easily as L'ultima Meta or Megaforce.
It's hard to pick just one Henry Silva movie, but I picked perhaps one of his most brutal.
Playing as Quelli Che Contano (Those Who Matter) in Italy, as well as Love Kills and Guns of the Big Shots, this Andrea Bianchi-directed film is made of everything mean you can imagine. What else would you expect from the maker of Strip Nude for Your Killer and Burial Ground? A meditation on the value of mindfulness?
When the Italian mob families of Don Ricuzzo Cantimo and Don Turi Scannapieco keep their battles and crimes going to such a degree that they're smuggling heroin in the body of a dead child — yes, this is how the movie begins — the big bosses leave the decision as to how to handle business in the hands of Don Cascemi.
He calls in an expert — Tony Aniante (Silva) — and tells him to kill everyone, which he does with no small amount of Yojimbo/A Fistful of Dollars influence. There's a lot to deal with, like the fact that Scannapieco has it in for Cantimo because he killed his son-in-law and made his daughter go off the deep end while also crippled her son. And oh yeah, Ricuzzo's week (Barbara Bouchet, more on her in a minute) decides that she's got to get some Silva stirring up in her guts. If that doesn't get confusing enough. Ricuzzo's youngest son and Scannapieco's younger daughter are also ready to play an eternal game of hide the cannoli.
Hey wait — didn't you say this movie was brutal and potentially deranged?
Why yes, I did.
Before it's over, we have heads exploding as they're shot, a child's body on an autopsy table, a head goes flying out a windshield, multiple dead bodies smashed by a steamroller, a bandsaw go clean through someone's head and Silva drag Bouchet around a barn, beat her with a belt, then beat her in the face with the belt buckle, then have violent bloody sex with her in a grimy barn. Earlier in the film — because this is an Italian film where women come to enjoy all manner of upsetting couplings, our hero shoves her head into a bloody pig carcass while they make love — well, not really, right? — in the kitchen. To make things worse, Bouchet is totally turned on by this experience. Then she tells her husband all about it, because that's the only way they can make love. Yes, this movie is the scumbag movie that scumbag movies warned you about.
Tony is brutally efficient, whistling his signature song before quickly blasting guys in the head with his Luger, like some unholy Italian western character combined with his Johnny Cool role. He's death itself, as a scene of him walking into a Sicilian town has everyone closing their windows rather than even seeing him show up. Stick around for the end of the film, which neatly explains exactly why Tony whistles that tune as he murders everyone around him.
Released in the US with that garish poster above by Joseph Brenner Associates — the people who brought you Eyeball, The Devil's Rain!, The Girl in Room 2A and many more — Cry of a Prostitute was sold with the tagline, "For a lousy twenty-five bucks, some people think they can do anything!" along with Bouchet's abused face.
Bouchet would tell House of Freudstein, "That was unpleasant I didn't remember it being that unpleasant when we made it. In fact I prefer not to remember too much about that one. When Quentin Tarantino arranged a screening of some of my movies in LA he opened with that one and I wish he hadn't…" However, in Eurocrime! The Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the '70s, Silva claims that Bouchet was tougher than nearly any of the men he met in those movies and intimidated him.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/06/23
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Audience Member
Uno de los giallo más interesantes que he podido ver. Para empezar me gusta mucho cuando se intenta mezlcar posible tramas sobrenaturales con una de suspense policial, y me encanta el hecho de que casi hasta el final de la pelÃcula te estas preguntando a tà mismo quià (C)n podrÃa ser el asesino, y casi seguro que te equivocas al final.
Por supuesto no algunas tramas y giros no están tan trabajadas como deberÃa, pero al menos no sufre mucho de un clásico cliche del giallo: el "personaje que aparece de la nada para la trama"; sà es verdad que el foco de la historia cambia mucho entre personajes, pero al menos siempre están presentes lo suficiente como para que no te sientas que el guionista acaba de sacarselo de la manga.
Otro punto a favor es lo macabra que puede ser la cinta, algo que es habitual en los giallo por supuesto.
Sin duda esta cinta de Miraglia es un "must see" para todo aquel que está adentrándose en el universo del giallo.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/29/23
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Displays none of the visual flair of Miraglia's earlier The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave to keep things from getting draggy.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/13/23
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With a title so magnificently direct (and so magnificently provocative), it's a good thing that "The Red Queen Kills Seven Times" is a sturdy slasher flick that delivers on what it promises with such demented creativity. Touted as one of the finest examples of the giallo subgenre - a type of Italian horror movie as besotted with its own style as it is with its lip-smacking carnage - it's a B-movie that pushes past its budgetary limits and its inadequately talented actors through artistic competence and through a story that really does sizzle. It's all decently throwaway, but its notable imaginativeness renders it as a hidden gem within a genre that, at its 1970s peak, attracted more duds than diamonds.
Co-written and directed by Emilio Miraglia, a cult filmmaker also known for his helming of the previous year's "The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave," "The Red Queen Kills Seven Times" works with a tongue-in-cheek premise and allows for it to build upon itself beautifully. Comely giallo favorite Barbara Bouchet ("The Black Belly of the Tarantula," "Don't Torture a Duckling") stars as Kitty Wildenbrück, a blond whose angelic exterior hardly matches her tormented interior. Though a successful photographer working for Springe Fashions, a sordid past stalks her every move - and as the film opens, we almost immediately decide that she'd be wiser to face the facts than to continue running away from them.
A few months earlier, she accidentally killed her raven haired sister, Evelyn, in a vicious cat fight near the embankment behind their family home, the sinister Wildenbrück Castle. Such an action is already ghastly to its very core, but the family's violent past fuels intrigue. According to legend, the Wildenbrück clan descends from a pair of medieval sisters, individually known as the Black Queen and the Red Queen, whose ultimately lethal feud led to a curse that reappears every century. Each time, the Black Queen's successor murders the descendent of the Red Queen, only to have the latter come back from the dead, off six helpless victims, and eventually have her revenge on her sister.
Since history tends to repeat itself, one can expect that Kitty's deleterious mistake will come back to bite her. And, apparently, it'll come back to bite those closest to her, too: her family, along with many of her closest friends, knew of her role in Evelyn's demise but still aided her in keeping her death a secret. So when mysterious, savage slaughters begin occurring left and right, all committed by a figure wearing a blood red cloak, nothing prevents us from coming to the conclusion that Evelyn's back, super pissed off, and ready to kill.
And what a grand entrance it is. With her operatic costume and wonderfully maniacal laugh, the titular Red Queen is one of the most memorable within the giallo sphere, even if the film itself is not nearly as memorable as she is. But while the movie's skimpy on personality, it, regardless, draws up a delectably deadly atmosphere that supports the No One Is Safe ideal with a compulsively watchable (and charmingly bonkers) plot and a weak spot for dangerous carnality and truculent violence. It's good at what it does, catering to viewers who have an insatiable thirst for whodunits peppered with sensationalism. Giallo fans are in for something special.
It doesn't reach the same quality of the films of Dario Argento (what can?), and maybe isn't even decent enough to stand next to the works of Sergio Martino and Lucio Fulci and live. But "The Red Queen Kills Seven Times," with its shocker of an ending (I'm a sucker for conspiracy) and its loving lensings of Eurobabes Bouchet and Sybil Danning (who steals the movie as a scheming model), is a satisfying thrill ride of surprising inventiveness, to be taken with a light heart and a craving for schlock.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/03/23
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Audience Member
Cool Giallo with some gory murder scenes--The Red Queen Reigns Supreme!!
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/22/23
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Audience Member
Barbara Bouchet is terrorized by so many awful events in this movie. The guilt of killing her sister, the curse of the Red Queen, a rape, blackmail, a terrible boyfriend, a horrible photography assistant, a miserable family. The Red Queen killer was a shocker at the time, I suppose and somewhat icon in the Giallo canon, but really gets only one really good scene. The rest of the time, its all dagger and cape. Which would make a great name for a secret society, but not a giallo killer. The plot does hold up, somewhat, but suffers from lack of enough distinction btwn actresses. Still the ending is amazing, if only because of how easily the whole plot unravels. Oh and the best thing in the movie? The corpse hidden in the basement closet. Best hiding spot ever!
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
02/16/23
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