Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: 1980s

Ad un passo dall’aurora (One Step Away from Dawn) is based on the book Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler and is about a rich surgeon, married to a beautiful woman, who seeks new and more erotic experiences outside of his marriage and wait, this is the same story as Eyes Wide Shut, except instead of Stanley Kubrick directing, it has Mark B. Light. Of course, that’s Mario Bianchi, the man who helmed Kill the Poker Player, the “Lucio Fulci Presents” films Sodoma’s Ghost and The Murder Secret and Satan’s Baby Doll, After this movie, he’d spend most of the next decade making adult films as Nicholas Moore, Tony Yanker and Martin White, including the scenes that would make up the 2001 compilation movie John Holmes vs. Ilona Staller.

That said, even though so much of Bianchi’s career was in actual dirty movies and this is a movie about sex, this is somewhat chaste. I mean, yes, it has a female masturbation scene, but the orgy that is at the center of the story feels like a sex party from a TV movie.

Riccardo Varchi (Gerardo Amato) is a cardiologist who becomes obsessed with a sex worker named Lù (Tinì Cansino, who I am as well already obsessed over as she was Arabella: Black Angel) and attends the aforementioned orgy, where he’s soon blackmailed.

This is not the only Italian film inspired by the same story. 1982’s Il cavaliere, la morte e il diavolo (The Knight, Death and the Devil), directed by Beppe Cino (La Casa del Buon Ritorno), is also an adaption and adds a punk girl to the tale.

I love that Stanley Kubrick probably watched this to get ready to make his movie. He probably did more takes of one scene that Bianchi did in this entire movie.