Short Night of Glass Dolls

Hardly ever a movie got me clinging to my chair so much till literally the last seconds! "Malastrana" tells the story of a journalist (Jean Sorel) in Prague. He lies helplessly in a hospital and remembers in flashbacks how his girlfriend (young Barbara Bach) disappeared. Since the police was not helpful, he tried to find clues what has happened to her. Abduction, murder, or did she just run away?

In true giallo tradition, this is a movie about bizarre killings employing an eccentric visual style, dark and mysterious, but "Malastrana" is more than that. In a dialogue which was cut from the original German version (restored for the DVD release 2006), an old man bitterly sums up how the rich and powerful will always find somebody else to die for them, from the soldier on the battlefield to the... well, butterflies. You don't understand my last remark, I guess. You will when you watch this movie. Hush! No more.