If you ever wondered what happened to the old Italian giallo genre from the 1970's (aside from Dario Argento doing a periodic, relatively big-budget revival film like "Sleepless" now and then), well, they basically kind of merged with the much less interesting "erotic thriller" genre. I'm not sure who was really more responsible for the "erotic thrillers", the Americans or the Italians. The American ones were probably inspired by "Basic Instinct", "9 and 1/2 Weeks" and (going back a little) "Body Heat", but the Italians developed their own parallel strain of these films that were basically just very sexed-up and plot-deficient gialli. There was stuff like "Fatal Temptation", "Arabella, the Black Angel", and "Taste of Fear". And there is this one.
This is about a wealthy, married woman (Milly D'Abraccio) who goes to a sleazy erotic photographer as gift for her husband (I think). The handsome photographer seduces her, and he has a female accomplice who snaps additional photos for the purposes of blackmail. Nevertheless, she recommends the guy to another much less happily married friend (Valentine Demy),and the friend much more enthusiastically goes to bed with him too. It all ends in a pretty bathetic fashion. As you might have noticed, there is a lack of the kind of palate-cleansing violence that always made the earlier gialli kind of entertaining, no matter how ridiculously sex-soaked some of them were. The gialli often had a lot of sex in them, but this movie and other later "erotic thrillers" are pretty much NOTHING BUT sex. They also pale compared to the earlier gialli when it comes to plot--the gialli had intricate, and convoluted (if often quite absurd)plots while these films have very basic to the point of virtually non-existent plots--and when it comes to film style--the gialli were often wild stylized with great musical scores while these are just so much soft-focus "porn gloss" with vomit-inducing late 80's/early 90's canned "romantic" music.
Milly D'Abraccio and Valentine Demy both have incredible bodies (although I suspect the body of future hardcore star Demy is not entirely real). There's probably sufficient material here to inspire lone mail viewers to "fire one off" as it were, but afterward even they will have a hard time sitting through the rest of this movie. Although he used a pseudonym in the print I saw, I wasn't at all surprised to find out this was directed by perennial Italian hack Maurizio Garazziano. He was trying to do in the giallo with ridiculous amounts of softcore porn way back in the late 70's with "Play Motel". But at least that very wrong-headed film had some memorable WTF moments. This one is just plain boring I'm afraid.
