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Short Night Of Glass Dolls
[Blue Underground]
1971; color
Directed by Aldo Lado
Starring: Ingrid Thulin, Jean Sorel, Mario Adorf, Barbara Bach & Fabijan Sovagovic
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Short Night Of Glass Dolls is a somewhat long winded, drawn out slice of Eurotrash, although it is marketed (and described by other reviewers) as a Giallo. I have to argue that point though; as there is no black gloved killer, no series of beautiful women (or anyone really) menaced by said black gloved killer, and none of the ultimate closure that comes from seeing an unknown assailant unmasked and killed simultaneously. (All of which are trademarks of the genre as far as I can tell.) Another way this differs from the other Giallos I've seen is, while many are disjointed, this film goes beyond being merely disjointed and crosses over into daytime TV territory in the way we're expected to make sense of things that clearly make no logical sense. For example, a storyline where a child is born in secret and adopted by a couple who, a few years later, is tragically killed in a tragic car accident that just so happens to take place in a town where a college friend of the adoptive mother, who is physically unable to give birth to a child of her own, is a surgical nurse. Then the surgical nurse winds up adopting the child after the non-biological mother dies, only to be killed herself another few years later in an equally tragic shoot-out at a friend's wedding; causing the child's true biological father - who has been searching for her ever since the day he learned she existed - to be revealed as the child's father by his mortal enemy, who is also the biological father of said man's step children, in order to rid himself of the ghost of the child's biological mother, aka his ex-wife. Did you catch all of that? Well, it doesn't matter because it's not the plot of this movie, it's one of the current storylines on All My Children. My point is to say, a movie about a man who is dead but not dead, trying to determine the cause of his paralysis via random events that we are supposed to believe led up to the series of events that caused his current situation, including the appearance and disappearance of a beautiful woman he was in love with (Barbara Bach) and an Satanic senior citizen orgy, is equally unrealistic. To backtrack a bit, when we first come across our hero / victim he certainly does appear to be dead. Especially to the untrained eye of a random dude who just found a seemingly dead body in a park. Which explains how the guy winds up in the morgue. However, as the dude sweeping the park at night would know if he could hear the voice-over, the fellow is not dead. Not at all. He is merely paralyzed on the outside. On the inside, he is very much alive. Which we learn via a monologue that totally reminds me of the video for Metallica's "One." Although the Kommandant says his predicament is much more akin to the Venom song, "Buried Alive." (To prove his point, he sang the first couple stanzas; to the surprise of no one, as the husband will take any opportunity to sing Venom songs!) At any rate, we also learn - via voice-over - that he plans to use his still-viable mind to journey backwards in time in order to uncover the mystery of how he ended up this way. I will spare you of further details, partially because I wouldn't want to spoil it for you should you choose to brave this slow paced oddity, and partially because I don't remember some of the details. (But mostly because the details I do remember confuse me.)
—Bunny
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