Casa d'appuntamento (1972)

Director:

Ferdinando Merighi

Writers:

Paolo Daniele (story)
Marius Mattei (writer)

Release Date:

16 June 1972 (Italy)

Genre:

Thriller | Horror

Plot Keywords:

Rampage | Deeply Disturbed Person | Stabbed In The Back | Exhibitionist | Fear

Cast

Anita Ekberg	...	Madame Colette
Rosalba Neri	...	Marianne
Evelyne Kraft	...	Eleonora (as Evelyn Kraft)
Howard Vernon	...	Professor Waldemar
Pietro Martellanza	...	Antoine Gottvalles (as Peter Martell)
Barbara Bouchet	...	Francine
Robert Sacchi	...	Inspector Pontaine
Eva Astor
Rolf Eden	...	Pepi
William Alexander
Piera Viotti
Alessandro Perrella
Ada Pometti

Also Known As:

Auge des Bösen (West Germany)
Der Ripper kommt auf leisen Sohlen (West Germany)
French Sex Murders (USA) (DVD title)
Murder in Paris
Murder on 17th Avenue
The Bogeyman and the French Murders
The French Sex Murders (USA)
The Paris Sex Murders

Runtime:

West Germany:83 min

Country:

Italy | West Germany

Language:

Italian

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.66 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

West Germany:18 (nf) | Germany:18 | Norway:(Banned) (video version) (1986)

Company:

Costantino International Films

Trivia:

Italian censorship visa # 60412 delivered on 26-5-1972.

entertaining giallo, but what's with the death scenes being tinted and repeated?

The first frames of the movie are of someone falling from the Eiffel Tower. Police arrive at the Eiffel Tower and chase someone up it, who then falls from the Eiffel Tower. At first, I wondered if this was a copycat, or a jumper who failed to kill himself the first time, ala The Tenant. No, it's the same guy and we're just seeing the same thing twice. And in fact, towards the end of the movie, it's seen again, since the movie jumps back further in time for the bulk of the story.

There's repetition in the movie with most of the kills, too. We'll see it once, then the footage is repeated with the screen tinted red, then again tinted blue, green, purple.... Odd choice.

So, after we see the figure fall from the Eiffel Tower for the second time, a Bogart-looking police inspector tells us "it all began the last day of Carnival." A thief steals some jewels, then sneaks his way into a brothel, where he is known and not very welcome. He meets up with his girlfriend, leaves, and it's discovered that one of the women has been killed. The emotionally disturbed thief is a pretty good suspect, and he's caught, tried and convicted pretty quickly. But did they get the right person or not?

For a movie set around a brothel, there's relatively little nudity, I thought. The women don't wear even very revealing outfits, though the ones they do wear are unusually fetching.

It's a pretty good movie. It's certainly helped by the good picture and sound quality on the DVD by Mondo Macabro, and by a good collection of extras. It's interesting how a movie can wind up with different scenes in different markets - they compiled the longest version they could, which evidently had never existed in that form anywhere. There are also two cut scenes, one with alternate dialog for the French version, and the other featuring a cut scene that was in pretty rough shape.

The whole movie, except for a few foreign-language scenes subtitled in English, has all English dialog. It's too bad they didn't add English subtitles or closed captions for the hearing impaired, which can be useful even for people who aren't. It might have been nice to have a full length-foreign language track, but this is nitpicking.