This year's Dario Angento feature is The Cat O'Nine Tails, an early giallo that leans more into the murder mystery aspects of the genre than the grisly horror aspects. Karl Malden stars as Franco "Cookie" Arnò, a former journalist, now blind, who lives with his orphaned niece, Lori (Cinzia De Carolis). When Franco stumbles upon a blackmail scheme, he teams up with a reporter (James Franciscus) and together they uncover a murder plot involving a genetic research facility.
While the film does contain some of Argento's trademarks - lots of eyeballs; wacky, implausible science; some grisly kills - it's definitely not as garish as his movies would eventually get, which means I found this one a tad boring.
Also, finding a good streaming copy was frustrating! Like most Italian movies, the dialogue was dubbed in post production, buy it's obvious Karl Malden is speaking English throughout. But the only English language version I could find online was a terrible print, so I ended up watching the Italian language version on Kanopy, because the print is beautiful. But watching Karl Malden "speak" Italian though the whole thing was just damned distracting! So, not an ideal viewing experience, but definitely more enjoyable than last year's Argento entry.
No comments:
Post a Comment