EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this movie tonight at 7 PM PT at the Los Feliz 3 in Los Angeles. You can get tickets here. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.

Has a movie ever had a better title? Nope. Sergio Martino’s fourth entry into the giallo genre, following The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail and the previously reviewed All the Colors of the Dark, it refers to the note that the killer leaves to Edwige Fenech’s character in Mrs. Wardh. And the title is way better than the alternate ones this film has — Gently Before She Dies, Eye of the Black Cat and Excite Me!

Martino wastes no time at all getting into the crazy in this one — Oliviero Rouvigny (Luigi Pistilli from A Bay of Blood, Iguana with the Tongue of Fire, Death Rides a Horse) is a dark, sinister man, a failed writer and alcoholic who lives in a mansion that’s falling apart (If this all feels like a modernized version of a Poe story like The Fall of the House of Usher, it’s no accident. There’s even an acknowledgment that the film is inspired by The Black Cat in the opening credits.). His wife, Irina (Anita Strindberg from A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin and Who Saw Her Die?), suffers his abuses, but never more so than when he gathers hippies together for confrontational parties. He makes everyone pour all of their wine into a bowl and forces her to drink it, then humiliates their black servant Brenda until one of the partygoers starts singing and everyone joins in, then gets naked. This scene is beyond strange and must be experienced. Luckily, I found the link for you, but trust me — it’s NSFW.

The only person that Oliviero seems to love is Satan, the cat that belonged to his dead mother. A black cat that talks throughout every scene he’s in, his constant meows led to my cats communicating with the TV. God only knows what a 1970’s giallo cat said, but it seems like his words spoke directly to their hearts.

One of Oliviero’s mistresses is found dead near the house, but he hides her body. The police suspect him, as does his wife. Adding to the tension is the fact that Irina hates Satan, who only seems to care about messing with her beloved birds.

Remember that servant? Well, she’s dead now, but not before she walks around half-naked in Oliviero’s mother’s dress while he watches from the other room. She barely makes it to Irina’s room before she collapses, covered in blood. Blood that Satan the cat has no problem walking through! He refuses to call the police, as he doesn’t want any more suspicion. He asks his wife to help him get rid of the body.

Oliviero’s niece Floriana (Edwige Fenech, pretty much the queen of the giallo) is in town for a visit, learning how Oliviero hasn’t been able to write one sentence over and over again for three years, stuck in writer’s block (and predating The Shining by 5 years in book form and 8 years away from Kubrick’s film). Unlike everyone else who tolerates Oliviero’s behavior or ignores it, Floriana sees right through the bullshit. The writer is used to seducing every woman he meets and she initially rebuffs him, even asking if it’s true that Oliviero used to sleep with his mother. He angrily asks if it’s true that she’s a two-bit whore. “Those would be two bits worth spending,” is her caustic reply.

Irina confides all of her pain to Floriana as the two become lovers. And another girl gets murdered — perhaps by Oliviero. Then, a dirt bike racer comes to drop off milk and hit on Floriana. Whew — I was wondering when this film would get hard to follow and start piling on the red herrings!

After being questioned by the police, Oliviero comes home to choke his wife. He stops at the last second…then we’re off to the races! The motorbike races! The milkman loses when his bike breaks down, but he’s the real winner — taking Floriana back to the abandoned house that he lives in. And oh look — there’s creepy Oliviero watching the action.

Meanwhile, Satan has gotten into the coop and chowed down on several of the birds. Irina catches him and they have quite the battle. He scratches her numerous times before she stabs him in the eye with a pair of scissors. An old woman watches and is chased away by Irina’s yelling.

She’s afraid that her husband will kill her once he learns that she killed Satan. And Oliviero keeps wondering where the cat is, especially after he buys the cat his favorite meal from the store — sheep eyes. That said — Satan might not be so dead, as we can hear his screaming and see him with a missing eye.

Floriana puts on Oliviero’s mother’s dress, asking if this is what the maid looked like before she died. Whether it’s the dress or the forbidden family love or just her beauty, he rips off her dress — at her urging, mind you — and begins making love to his niece. We cut to Idrina, caressing her pet birds, when Oliviero confronts her with scissors and questions about Satan. He almost stabs her before he ends up raping her inside the coop, while Floriana looks on. She playing them off the other, even telling Idrina that she’s slept with her husband. She also tells her that Oliviero wants to kill her, so she should kill him first.

Idrina wakes up to the sound of Satan, but can’t find him anywhere. What she does find is her husband in bed with Floriana, who is belittling him. With every sinister meow, there’s a zoom of the cat’s damaged eye. Finally, Oliviero attacks her for spying on him, slapping her around before he leaves to write. She walks the grounds of the mansion, seeing the motorcycle rider make a date with Floriana and catching sight of Satan, who runs from her. In the basement, she finds scissors and the hidden bodies of her husband’s lover and the murdered maid. In a moment of clarity — or madness — she stabs her husband while he sleeps. The sequence is breathtaking — a giallo POV shot of the murder weapon intercut with the same sentence being typed over and over interspersed with all of the abuses that Oliviero had wrought upon her. She stabs again and again before Floriana interrupts, asking her if it was easy. The sentence that the author had written again and again was him claiming that he would kill her and there was a space in the wall for her, so obviously, she had to kill him.

As for Floriana, all she wanted was the family jewels, which were hidden in the house. They seal Oliviero’s corpse within the wall while Walter watches from afar. He’s played by Ivan Rassimov, who does creeping staring dudes better than anyone else — witness his work in All the Colors of the Dark. And it turns out that he’s the real killer! He’s been typing “vendetta” over and over again. Floriana asks if Idrina was planning to kill her before she runs off into the night, then Walter appears to kiss Idrina. Turns out they were working together all along — she tells him where to find Floriana the next morning. Holy shit — Idrina reveals her whole plot, revealing how she drove her husband crazy, making him believe that he could have been a murderer! She wishes that there was an afterlife so Oliviero’s mother — who she killed! — could tell him how great her revenge was. She ends by wishing that her husband was still alive so that he could suffer for eternity.

Walter sets up an accident that takes out Floriana and her boyfriend, as their motorcycle crashes, sending blood across the white heart of a billboard and out of her lips. He tosses a match on the gasoline-soaked highway, burning both of their corpses. He collects the jewelry and gives it to Idrina, who responds by shoving him off a cliff!

When she returns to the mansion, the police are there, as there were alerted to her stabbing Satan by the old woman. They come inside the house to write a statement, but hear the sound of Satan’s meows. Following the sound, they find him inside a wall — with the corpse of her husband!

Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key is superb. An intriguing story — only a few derailing giallo moments (like the killing of the girl in the room with the dolls and the B roll motocross scenes) — with great acting, eye-catching camerawork and some genuine surprises, it’s well worth seeking out and savoring.

Hi EDITOR’S NOTE: When Bill Van Ryn asked me if he could write something for the holidays, I was overjoyed. This is such a gift for all of us. Check out Bill at Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum.

Nothing can derail a festive holiday with the relatives like dark family secrets bubbling up to the surface, and there’s likely to be at least one of those loved ones that are downright ornery. This is the case in one of my favorite holiday horror films, the 1972 film most commonly known as Silent Night, Bloody Night. Originally released in 1972 as Dark Night of the Full Moon by the Cannon Group, they reissued it in 1973 with the new title and ad campaign that emphasized the Christmas connection in the story, and it played grindhouses and drive-ins throughout the rest of the 1970s, often as a co-feature to other Cannon releases such as I, Monster, It first appeared on TV in 1974 as a CBS Late Movie, but it also screened on WOR-TV more than a few times, including their beloved Fright Night time slot on Saturday nights, which is where I saw it as a kid. It was resurrected for theatrical release yet again in 1981, The Year of the Slasher, as Death House, or Deathouse as appeared on the title card. I can’t imagine what it felt like to go see this movie in 81 and realize that you’d seen it on TV seven years ago, but nobody should have complained, because seeing it a few times makes the convoluted plot a little more clear. I know that it was very confusing to ten-year-old me watching it on WOR in the middle of the night.

It’s hard to imagine this low key film appearing so often in front of glassy eyed moviegoers and TV-
watching night owls. It’s got a few shocking moments, but it was a weird experience to be confronted with this at 1 in the morning. It’s a murder mystery involving a big old mansion with a sinister past.
Jeffrey Butler, the grandson of the now-deceased proprietor, Wilfred Butler, inherited the house after the death of his grandfather about 20 years prior. Jeffrey intends to sell the place, but when this news get out, an unseen inmate of a local mental hospital breaks out and returns to the house, murdering anyone who dares step inside. The first to go is the lawyer closing the sale of the house, who makes the mistake of sleeping there overnight with his young ladyfriend. Since he’s played by Patrick O’Neal, the moment when they get graphically axed is the Janet Leigh shock of the film.

O’Neal was likely the highest profile in the cast at the time, but there are numerous actors in the film who would later become well-known cult icons. Mary Woronov plays Diane, a young woman from town who happens to be the daughter of the Mayor. She helps Jeffrey unravel the mystery of the house, and all sorts of unsavory history is exhumed while the killer slashes his way through several other cast members. Together they learn that Jeffrey is actually Wilfred Butler’s son AND his grandfather, since Wilfred raped his own daughter, Marianne. The baby was spirited away to another state, while Marianne suffered a psychological breakdown. Rather than institutionalizing her, Wilfred set up his mansion as an insane asylum, where he could keep a close eye on her. Eventually he became disillusioned with her so-called doctors, and turned the violent inmates loose on them, resulting in a Christmas Eve massacre where Marianne herself was killed. Diane doesn’t escape the curse of the mansion either, as she learns some unpleasant information about her own family and her connection to the tragic events.

Director Theodore Gershuny (“Sugar Cookies”) was married to Woronov at the time, and he displays
some style with his camera and his concepts. The most breathtaking and frightening sequence of the
movie is the moment when the inmates of the asylum silently surround the drunken doctors and their party guests before murdering them. This scene is full of Warhol personalities, including Ondine and Candy Darling -although technically her final film, this was actually filmed in 1970 and not released until 72. John Carradine also appears in this, because of course he is in every movie. His character is mute, so we don’t hear his distinctive voice, but he communicates by ringing a bell, as if he’s summoning a missing clerk to a vacant drug store counter.

The holiday imagery is not quite as pronounced as it is in movies like Black Christmas and Silent Night Deadly Night, but we do get some very yuleish (as Barb Coard would say) moments. The characters listen to Christmas carols on the radio, Woronov wraps gifts in front of a fire, and the tone of the film is very wintry. Certain outdoor scenes look as if they were filmed some time after a snowfall began to melt, as portions of the ground seem to have a thin layer of snow and others are muddy. This isn’t the scenic kind of winter, it’s the unpleasant kind that has you tracking mud into the house. Whether or not this was intentional, it takes the romance out of Christmas just a little. And incidentally, it seems as if the Black Christmas game plan of menacing phone calls placed by a killer on Christmas may have been inspired just a little bit by this movie – or perhaps that’s just another Christmas miracle. I love the muted, downbeat atmosphere of Silent Night, Bloody Night a lot, and it does seem to be the movie that knows the most about how family dysfunction can easily lead to an eyeball being gouged out with a wine glass on Christmas Eve. Happy holidays!

After two men assault one of her girls, Margo (Regina Carrol) finds him and whips him. In between this movie being Screaming Eagles and tough women in foreign prison movies getting hot, this was reshot and re-edited to make it fit into the changing world of exploitation. Another thing that changed was while movies had been shot by Al Adamson at the Spahn Ranch for a while, now the specter of the Manson Family hung over everything. So when cult leader King (William Bonner) makes life tough for the bikers and also controls the ranch’s owner Parker (Kent Taylor), you get taken out of the movie and wonder how much of this is based on things Adamson and his crew actually experienced.

Sam Sherman told Filmfax: “We even had some members of the Manson gang in it, people who had been hanging around. I don’t know if they were killers or not. What happened in this instance was one of those things you can’t imagine or even predict.”

Ross Hagen is the hero, as much as anyone in a biker movie can be the hero, is the lead.

Also known as Commune of Death, a title that leans into the Manson parts of this movie, this is a film that ends with Hagen dropping his motorcycle off a cliff and onto a car, which inexplicably explodes.

A lost movie from Al Adamson and Sam Sherman, this softcore Western was filmed on Spahn Ranch, the same place where Charles Manson and his Family were living as they attempted to commit Helter Skelter.

The cast has Gary Kent, the stuntman who Danger God was made about, as a prospector; Bambi Allen (who also appeared in adult films as Holly Woodstar; she’s also in Satan’s Sadists and The Bang Bang Gang under the name Chata Cruz) and Rene Bond (one of the first adult stars; mainstream appearances include one of the evil women in Invasion of the Bee Girls, Please Don’t Eat My Mother! and the TV movie Betrayal) as two kidnapped girls; and for the evil men stealing all these ladies, there’s John “Bud” Cardos, George “Buck” Flower and Eric Stern.

It did play theaters but it just can’t be found. If it were, it would have showed up on Severin’s all-encompassing box set.

When a good witch sends Django one hundred years into the future, he has to protect humanity from Godzilla. Yet even his abilities are not enough, so the sorceress sends him assistance in the form of Trinity. Can these two Italian Western heroes stand a chance against the Japanese King of the Monsters?

Edited by Steven Sloss, this fan trailer was edited together from seven different films, with music and sound effects from many others. It also has some original voice acting.

I know this isn’t real but I was so happy after watching this that I decided to share it with all of you.