Dick Butler (Ray Lovelock, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue) and Ingrid Sjorman (Ornella Muti, Flash Gordon) are trying to enjoy their own summer of love, traveling through Italy and paying for it with porn magazines and nudes of Ingrid. They get put through a relentless wringer. First, the police bust their smut-peddling operation; then, a biker gang strips them of what little dignity they had left. By the time they reach the gates of a sprawling, modernist villa, they aren’t looking for enlightenment. They’re looking for a place to hide.

Also known as An Ideal Place to Kill, Deadly Trap, Dirty Pictures and Love Stress in Japan, this Umberto Lenzi giallo is all about what happens next.

Our hapless couple has found their way to the home of bored middle-class housewife Barbara Slater (Irene Papas, Don’t Torture a Duckling). She’s up for some sexual shenigans, potentially with both of them, but she’s also way smarter than either of our teenagers realizes.

Dick and Ingrid aren’t just hippies; they are the poster children for 1971’s fading counterculture. Beautiful, entitled and spectacularly dim-witted, their “Summer of Love” is less about spiritual awakening and more about a sleazy, high-speed hustle across the Italian countryside.

In the book Blood and Black Lace: The Definitive Guide to Italian Sex and Horror Movies, Lenzi claimed that he had trouble getting Papas to participate in the threesome scene. What he had no trouble with was getting Lovelock’s help in capturing the free spirit of 1971, as he sings the theme “How Can You Live Your Life?” and rocks out some amazing clothes, including the Union Jack jacket that appears on the poster for the Oasis of Fear release of this movie.

This movie was shot in the same home as Fulci’s Perversion Story and Argento’s The Cat O’Nine Tails. I have no idea where they got the matching white bell-bottom outfits or the yellow old-school car they covered in flower stickers.

While not a top-tier giallo, this is still a quick watch packed with plenty of twists. Don’t get it confused with another Lenzi movie, A Quiet Place to Kill.