So Sweet, So Dead
So Sweet, So Dead
R | 18 July 1972 (USA)
So Sweet, So Dead Trailers

A serial killer is on the loose. His victims are unfaithful wives and he always leaves compromising photographs at the crime scene.

Reviews
Matcollis This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.
Bardlerx Strictly average movie
Sharkflei Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.
ChampDavSlim The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.
bensonmum2 I was looking for another Sylva Koscina movie to watch last night and stumbled across a Giallo she did that I had never seen. So Sweet, So Dead turned out to be a rather predictable, but highly enjoyable film. The set-up is straight out of the Giallo playbook – a masked, gloved killer is butchering beautiful women. Each of the women is involved in an extramarital affair. The killer leaves pictures of the women with their lovers at the scene of each murder. The police, led by Inspector Capuana (Farley Granger), are baffled. I wrote that So Sweet, So dead was predictable. That's to say there's not a lot of originality to the movie. The masked killer, the beautiful women, and the knife to the throat are standard fare in most any Giallo. Until the very end, the movie plays it reasonably straight without a lot of the plot twists and turns found in a lot of other Gialli. That all changes, however, in the last 10 minutes. The plot twist at the end is incredibly dramatic and left me with an uneasy, cold feeling. It completely caught me off guard. The twist was really a nice turn of events. I also want to give director Roberto Bianchi Montero (unknown to me) extra credit for creating atmosphere. For a movie like So Sweet, So Dead to be effective, you have to have atmosphere. Montero expertly ramps up the tension just prior to each kill. Nicely done.The cast is especially strong. Granger is very good. I've always found him underrated in any movie of his I've seen. Koscina is as delightful as ever. I only wish she had played a more prominent role in more of the movie. There are a lot of gorgeous women rounding out the cast, including a brief, but welcome performance from genre fav Susan Scott. I say "brief" because she shows up, has sex, and promptly gets killed. Not a lot of screen time in this one for her.
Solid_Gold I love this movie. The first time that I saw it was when I was a little girl, around 9 or 10 years old. The storyline is great: a killer who targets women who have been unfaithful to their husbands. It is unfair that the killer does not target unfaithful men, but hey, this is a giallo after all. It's funny because I am pretty sure that I only like this movie because I watch it in Italian, and that makes it exotic to me. If it were an American movie, I would probably not like it as much. Farley Granger is quite handsome, even more so than in "Strangers On A Train". There is a red herring that I found predictable, but I've been watching horror films for most of my life, so I often guess correctly what's going on. I knew who the killer really was long before it was revealed. I found the ending quite sad though. It would have been nice to have a different outcome. At least this giallo doesn't have the graphic violence that some of it's contemporaries have.
Scarecrow-88 Recently appointed Homicide detective, Inspector Capuana(Farley Granger)must uncover the identity of a serial killer who preys upon the adulterous bourgeoisie wives of High Society prominent city figures. The "sex maniac"(..he doesn't sexually molest his victims, but murders them because of their whoring ways)leaves photographs at the scene of the crime containing the victim with her lover in the act of passion. The very intelligent killer wears a stocking over his face, fedora hat, coat, black leather gloves, and uses a knife to stab his victims multiple times in a vicious, cold-blooded manner as they seek help, finding no one. Capuana is put in a corner by his superiors because he is not allowed to question the husbands of those killed, yet comes under scrutiny from the press in his difficulty catching the fiend. Paolo Santangeli(Silvano Tranquilli)is a very successful attorney with many affluent clients whose daughter sees the killer murder his lover(..and next door neighbor whose husband, after attempting suicide, is an impotent cripple).Solid casting of Granger adds quality to this ultra-sleazy giallo(..if you're looking for a giallo that doesn't skimp on the nudity, SO SWEET..SO DEAD is just right for you)with a really powerful conclusion(..it concerns Capuana himself and a sad, startling discovery really packs an emotional wallop;equally shocking is Capuana's decision not to help a victim in need). What I found truly amusing was how practically all married women were screwing around with a man behind their husband's back(..although, in Paolo's case, he and his wife, Franca, played by Annabelle Incontrera, both have open affairs with other people). Basically this film features bored, beautiful, glamorous women playing hanky panky while their hubbies are away on business. A minor problem that rather nagged me a bit was the inclusion of a sub-plot that is left unattended..Paolo's daughter, Bettina(Angela Covello)and her boyfriend Piero(Fabrizio Moresco)are featured, with her witnessing the murderer at work, seemingly a major development which will have the girl in mortal terror, only for it to be abandoned later altogether. Some of the most curvy, attractive, gorgeous European women you'll see in a giallo, parade(..without shame)around nude, stripping from their elegant wardrobes, without any inhibitions. Particularly tasty is Nieves Navarro as Lilly(Paolo's lover), Sylva Koscina(..as Capuana's wife), and Krista Nell as Renata(..a victim who attempts to escape up a spiral staircase, soon trapped and stabbed).Chris Avram is Professor Casali, a coroner(..and Capuana's confident)working with the police. Luciano Rossi is Casali's assistant, Gastone, a real weirdo who takes nude photographs of his dead ladies once his work is completed.
m0rphy Most movie buffs will have seen the captioned Hitchcock film from 1950 and perhaps the earlier "Rope" (1948) but here is a chance to see another Farley Granger performance 22 years down the line - I was impressed how little he had aged.He plays Inspector Capuana in this very average Italian horror film from 1972.In fact I found him unwittingly distracting because I kept thinking of the above films and how he now looked a bit like Rock Hudson in his mature years, wearing a moustache.Put simply, it is the story of a psychotic maniac who murders unfaithful wives by stabbing them after first taking the necessary photographic evidence which he then liberally sprinkles at the murder scene to "justify" his act.I was amazed how he knew who all these faithless wives were and where he found the time for his "hobby".The victims all seemed to know each other so the film seemed to be set in a hot bed of adultery.All the usual horror film cliches were present - the murderer who always seems to magically appear in the house by apparantly walking through solid doors and windows,(doesn't anyone ever lock their houses in horror films?).The chase scene where despite the girl running away, the slower moving maniac is always closer behind, the car door which is always locked preventing escape, the closed doors and windows etc.My! how all these women loved to smoke!!None of them seemed happy unless puffing away continually - its amazing they hadn't all died earlier from lung cancer!.I only bought the video to see Krista Nell but she only had one decent scene and then gets "bumped off" for her trouble before her boyfriend arrives at her house for "a bit of nooky".My video arrived with rather irritating Japanese subtitles.What was rather comical was that Farley Granger was obviously originally speaking his lines in English (the other actors in Italian) but his voice had then been overdubbed by another English speaking actor so we could understand.Instead, I kept hearing in my head his real voice from "Strangers oon a Train"..."Bruno you're crazy"!I won't provide spoilers in the extremely unlikely event anyone would want to buy this title after reading this review.The plot becomes rather repetitve after a while and the characters of the femaile adulterous victims become very one dimensional and there is a lot of bare bosom around from virtually all these lady victims.Another "comical" character was the blond mortuary attendant, he really seemed to be in his element as a rabid necrophilliac!Overall poor and I rated it 3/10.
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