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La mort c'est l'amour, "a constant fear" and a rare ecstasy. The kink link is between surgery room and boudoir, the doctor (Robert Flemyng) uses his anesthetic on patients at work and the wife (Maria Teresa Vianello) at home. Candles and velvet box with syringe adorn the fetish, an overdose snuffs out the maiden, her coffin is sealed in the crypt and a black cat leaps on it. The new bride (Barbara Steele) is "a little impressionable," ghostly footsteps and skeletal tree branches welcome her to the London mansion. "Death will take you as you sleep. A sleep eternal like death." The felicitous junction of Italian and English frissons thrives on elegant perversion, the punning title points up the continuous stream of Sir Alfred citations. Baleful housekeeper (Rebecca), lethal cup of milk (Suspicion), skull on the pillow (Under Capricorn). Above all, the morbid Vertigo urge made as explicit as the Victorian aristocracy will admit, an opulent sense of imbalance embedded into Riccardo Freda's mise en scène. (Twisted with illicit desire, the doctor steps toward the fetching cadaver under a sheet and a burst of lurid scarlet suddenly invades the clinical whites and blues of the chamber.) An unseen sister, "quite mad," a locked room with a noose glimpsed through a keyhole, a suite of Gothic images down to the trembling candelabra in the tenebrous corridor. The rain-streaked window pane rhymes with a casket's glass aperture for encasing the heroine's horror-stricken face, a hallucination reveals the misshapen ravisher behind the husband's patrician features. "The human body keeps its secrets well-hidden." D'Amato in Beyond the Darkness has the proper degradation-culmination. With Harriet Medin, Silvano Tranquilli, and Howard Nelson Rubien.
--- Fernando F. Croce |