Erotic Games of a Good Family was directed by Francesco Degli Espinosa and this is the only movie he ever directed. His credits include writing the Laura Gemser movie Emmanuelle On Taboo Island, Vengeance Is My Forgiveness and C’era una volta questo pazzo, pazzo, pazzo West. Strangely, he’s listed as the assistant director on his own film on IMDB for this movie.
It was written by Renato Polselli, which accounts for both the film’s psychological and prurient content.
Riccardo (Donald O’Brien) comes home early one night and finds his wife Elisa (Malisa Longo, Nude si muore) with her legs around another man. As the moralist husband barges in gun drawn, that man jumps out the window to escape. Riccardo tries to keep his morals about divorce and stays with his wife, but then decides to give her a sleeping pill in her whiskey, place her body in a sack and throw it down a hill. He’s overcome by anger when all he wants is love. This act drives him a bit insane, but it seems that all is healed when he and sex worker Eva (Erika Blanc, Kill, Baby…Kill!, A Dragonfly for Each Corpse, The Devil’s Nightmare) end up falling in love. Or lust. Yet he can’t stop seeing visions of his dead wife and in the middle of all that, he’s so far gone that he also starts trying to sleep with his niece Barbara (Maria D’Incoronato, Concorde Affaire ’79).
Of course, if you ever watched an Umberto Lenzi and Carroll Baker giallo, you know exactly what’s going on. Elisa and Eva are lovers, Elisa is still alive and yes, Eva and Barbara are also lovers. Everyone wants Riccardo’s sizeable fortune, so if they have to destroy him to get it, well, that’s a bonus.
Also known as Amoral Games and Thrilling Story, this is the kind of giallo that those who have seen many of the films in the form will probably enjoy. I mean, I know I did. It’s hilarious that the red-bearded man — spoiler that isn’t a spoiler, it’s Blanc, as if you could hide her rapturous beauty under a fake beard — keeps showing up, as does the dead wife. And I have a suspicion that Polselli directed just as much of this as Espinosa if that beyond extended lovemaking scene between O’Brien and Blanc is any evidence as well as the main plot idea that in the space of a few days, Riccardo goes from an ultra moral man to one who has killed his wife, pays for sex and is trying to sleep with a younger family member. Throw in some hallucinations and it’s very much his kind of movie.
I’m frankly shocked that this has never been released in the U.S. Maybe because there’s no dub — that I know of — but it certainly has the kind of feel and subject matter that gets people excited about giallo. The closing moments, when it all comes together, really pays everything off and nobody escapes unscathed.
It’s a simple detective story that’s pretty well told. What he told Jay Slater about the giallo fo Argento makes sense to me after watching this: “Argento doesn’t make real giallos. He takes five or six horrific elements and sticks them together with a very thin plot.”
This makes a good match for another Polselli-written giallo, Psychout for Murder.
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