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The Red Headed Corpse
[RetroMedia]
1971; color
Directed by Renzo Russo
Starring: Farley Granger, Erika Blanc, Krista Nell & Ivana Novak
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It's a good thing Erika Blanc looks as great as she does in this flick because, unless you're looking for a movie so confusing it requires an entire backstory recap at the end just to extricate itself from a maze of a plot, you ain't gonna find much else here. American actor Farley Granger stars as a painter who somehow or another acquires a mannequin, which he intends to use as a model. He also has a thing for the bottle and, after painting a face on his new acquisition in a sequence that marked the beginning of the movie's unraveling, at least for me (because I couldn't tell if it was the beginning of A: an extended dream sequence; B: a non-sensical, unexplained flashback; or C: a jump in time due to something like a missing reel… or D: any combination of the above) all of a sudden Erika Blanc becomes this drunk's girlfriend / model and she's not only beautiful, adoring, and horny, but mute. Gradually though, she begins to become more and more boisterous, domineering and threatening as the painter's work - all featuring her, of course - brings in more and more money. She begins having affairs, and flaunting them right in the painter's face, because she knows he doesn't have the guts to do anything about it. Finally, on the eve of her departure to Spain for a vacation with one of her lovers (which she does not know he knows about), she tries to bed the painter one last time. Sadly, he stabs her to death with a putty knife. You may think that marks the end of the major part of the story, and you're pretty much right. After he kills her, he looks down… and sees… she's the mannequin! Uh, wtf?! Then he does the most logical thing he can thin of at the time, bury her / the mannequin and beats the hell out of the dirt with the shovel. Back at his house, as he drowns his sorrows, there's a knock at the door. Guess who it is? Yep, it's the mannequin. Lookin' all creepy, and unburied, and somehow pissed; in what's possibly the best shot in the movie. He slams the door shut, opens it again and, of course, there's no dummy. He freaks out over seeing a flower on his doorstep , which leads to another round of beating the dirt with the shovel and his arrest by waiting police. I thought I was confused at this point but when the neighbor (who happened to be the paramour Blanc was planning to go to Spain with) gives the cops an explanation of an entire involved series of events that only exist in his backstory and were not actual scenes already shown in the movie, I pretty much threw in the towel. I'm sorry but if the plot is so Swiss-cheese-esque with holes that an entirely new explanation has to be added at the end of the movie, just to make an attempt to pull it all together, you've got a problem. Still, if you're a more devout devotee of Eurotrash - or, especially, a fan of Erika Blanc - I could recommend it.
—the Kommandant
(The Komandant's previously published review of The Faceless Monster can be found here; Bunny's review of Satanik can be found here.)
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