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Acid rock alternates with a stark heartbeat in the credits, the recurring theme of obscured vision has an iris shot during band rehearsal (it turns out to be the view from inside a guitar) and a protagonist who does not recognize himself in the insect caught between cymbals. The drummer (Michael Brandon) is followed by a trenchcoated stranger, the confrontation in the abandoned theater leaves the stalker with a knife in the belly while a masked figure in the balcony photographs it all. Blackmail, piano wire and whispers in the dark, a game. "I could kill you now, but it's not the right time." Dario Argento's electrifying suite of identifications encompasses the pixie wife (Mimsy Farmer), paternal cruelties and gender vengeance, plus a public decapitation that shows up in dreams as a castrating motif. "Oh, you heterosexuals," declares the private investigator (Jean-Pierre Marielle) with an unbeaten record of unsolved cases, nevertheless he gets to the bottom of the mystery: "Congratulations. You figured it out," the reward is a poisoned syringe in a subway lavatory. The maid (Marisa Fabbri) in the park is a Val Lewtonesque tour de force, a series of jump-cuts leave her locked up with death at nightfall. Eye Am a Camera (cf. Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase), unsolvable puzzles and warped realities. "God" is a burly outsider (Bud Spencer) who munches on raw fish, his sidekick (Oreste Lionello) is a shaggy professor whose resemblance to Godard adumbrates a joke from Il Conformista. (At the "Mostra Internazionale di Arte Funeraria" he naturally bumps into a Fritz Lang lookalike.) Flesh and glass and steel for the macabre-lyrical ending, it passes in slow-mo from Fellini's Toby Dammit toward Profondo Rosso. With Francine Racette, Aldo Bufi Landi, Calisto Calisti, and Fabrizio Moroni.
--- Fernando F. Croce |