Carol (Florinda Bolkan) is captivated by the unrestrained and uninhibited sex life of her neighbor Julia (Anita Strindberg) to the point that, with increasing intensity, she becomes more and more captivated by the desire to sexually mate with the emancipated girl...
Carol's drive finds outlet in dreams, increasingly cloaked in extreme urges, which reach their climax in the visualization of a heinous crime, victim the beautiful Julia....
The discovery of a personal diary, in which Carol describes her disturbing dream, puts her in the position of prime suspect, as soon as a vicious, sexually motivated crime materializes in reality, with Julia herself as the victim...
A succession of events, hovering between reality, dream and rambling will lead Carol over the abyss of madness, revealing an almost unexpected aspect of her personality...
The third giallo, shot entirely in London, directed by Fulci (after Una sull'Altra and Non si Sevizia un Paperino), the result of an international co-production involving France, Italy and Spain and the consequence of the collaboration, in writing the screenplay, of Roberto Gianviti (a regular collaborator of the director).
The film benefits from a good artistic cast, contemplating, in addition to the presence of Bolkan, Jean Sorel, Anita Strindberg and a young--and quite beautiful--Ely Galleani (who had already appeared in Bava's Reazione a Catena and later engaged in some of Joe D'Amato's erotic sets)...
The film, improperly placed at the tail end of the Argentian genre (due to a title imposed by the production), experiments with an extremely original dimension and highlights the director's stylistic development, which already here, although in the purely giallo narrative sphere, places moments of extreme visionariness (the hallucinated nightmares or some visually abstract sequences, such as the orgy or the one set on the train)...
Elements of stark realism (the vivisection of dogs) contrasted with delicate heavenly projections (the opening dream) give the film's atmosphere an ambiguous flavor, dispensing the viewer with a feeling of pleasant "visual" experience...
A film that, as happened previously with Non si Sevizia un Paperino, is the cause of a judicial controversy for Fulci, since Rambaldi is called upon to reproduce (in a courtroom) the special effect of "vivisection," in order to make clear that, on the -fictitious- dogs in the film, no form of real torture was performed...
Thus, on the matter, the director expressed himself in an interview published, back in August 1982, in Starbust magazine (Volume 4, Number12 - Stan Lee Publishing House) :
"Carlo Rambaldi was responsible for the special effects in the bat scene, which was not easy to shoot. He built mechanical bats that ran on wires waving their wings; He also added bat shadows. I remember Bava was impressed when he saw the sequence, although I am sure he would have done it better than I did. So for the dogs, Rambaldi used artificial material into which he inserted special bags that he could control from behind, thus giving the impression that the heart and guts were really moving. Some people believed we used real dogs but that is totally absurd because of the love I have for dogs, so we had to go through a trial. Fortunately, Rambaldi saved me from a two-year prison sentence by retrieving one of his synthetic dogs!" (Lucio Fulci)
To give an idea of the importance of this film in the world film scene, suffice it to say that Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) is, in its own way, an unofficial remake of it, so many are the similarities between the character played by Sharon Stone and that of Florinda Bolkan...
Review by Undying1
