The Bloodstained Shadow

This is a much more standard, and quite coincidentally much less good, giallo than our last entry, which is a bit of a shame because the back of the DVD helpfully informs me that this film contains one of the final scores by the legendary Italian rock band Goblin, and anyone familiar with Italian horror movies would not want their talents wasted on a weak film. Unfortunately, the band seems to have somewhat phoned things in for this film, much like everyone else.

The plot concerns a professor returning to his old hometown to visit his priest brother just as a series of murders begins rocking the small community. Reminding them of murders that happened in their childhoods, the two begin to investigate the murders in the hopes of finding and stopping the killer. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, in a movie like this, you generally actually would like the standard giallo cliché of having about a dozen or so characters that could conceivably be the actual killer, leaving you to try to guess which one it might turn out to be. Here, though, your options are a tad more limited, as both brothers act dangerously insane from the first time you meet them up until the end, where *SPOILER one of them is revealed to be the killer. When one of your main characters makes his first appearance by ranting about how sinful and evil everyone in town is, and the other main character is constantly having mental attacks and flashbacks to a childhood murder, you’re not really going to cast the widest net you could in search of who the killer might be.

After praising it yesterday, I’m going to staunchly ignore that this film seems to have also been filmed in Venice, except to note that the nice location shots are indeed the primary appeal of this film. There’s not too much else to recommend, really. What can I say, into each box set a little crap must fall.