Prostituzione (1974)

Director:

Rino Di Silvestro

Writer:

Rino Di Silvestro (writer)

Release Date:

17 October 1980 (Finland)

Genre:

Drama | Comedy

Tagline:

Risky Business In The World's Hottest Red- Light District!

Plot:

They're Italy's notorious "Ladies of the evening" catering to the strange cravings of their kinky, high-paying clients...

Cast

Maria Fiore	...	Primavera
Elio Zamuto	...	Michele Esposito
Krista Nell	...	Immacolata Mussomecci
Orchidea de Santis	...	Benedetta
Magda Konopka	...	Mrs. North
Andrea Scotti	...	Lt. Variale
Liana Trouche
Paolo Giusti	...	Antonio
Cristina Gaioni
Gianrico Tondinelli
Felicita Fanny
Raffaele Curi
Gabriella Lepori	...	Giselle Rossi
Gianni Pesola
Irene Renton

Also Known As:

Love Angels (USA)
Red Light Girls (USA)
Sex Slayer (Europe: English title)
Street Angels (International: English title)

Runtime:

70 min

Country:

Italy

Language:

Italian

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Certification:

Finland:(Banned) | Finland:K-18 (re-rating)

More soap opera than giallo

This movie is supposedly a giallo, and it starts promisingly enough with the murder of a young prostitute while a middle-age voyeur watches. Unfortunately it then becomes a particularly plodding police procedural as two especially dense cops are unable to uncover the glaringly obvious identity of the killer. But then there's also all kinds of barely related subplots. An older streetwalker is upset that a young john has fallen for her daughter (although it's not clear whether she's concerned or jealous). Another prostitute (Orchidea De Santis) tells a john that she gets pregnant easily (begging the question of why she chose this particular line of work). He accommodates her with some forcible anal sex, then his motorcycle-riding buddies show up and do the same. This naturally leads to a gratuitous motorcycle chasing scene where another group of bikers (friends of the prostitute)take revenge on the first one. You get the picture, it's more like a bizarre soap opera set in the red-light district than a giallo.

Probably the best reason to see this movie is for the impressive collection of second-tier Euro-babes that appear in it including Krista Nell, Magda Konopfka, Orchidea DeSantis, and Lucrezia Love. If you are at all familiar with the, uh, work of these actresses you know that they will all have their usual gratuitous nude scenes. Unfortunately, however, everything about their characters and their performances ends up being pretty gratuitous as well.

I read somewhere that sleaze-vet director Rino Di Silvestre actually received letters from real-life prostitutes praising the realism of this movie. Personally, I didn't find it too realistic (take the bizarre sex scene shot on negative film for no apparent reason). But then I guess I've never been a 70's era Italian prostitute.