So Sweet, So Dead (1972)

Straight out of the Giallo playbook, 26 April 2017

I was looking for another Sylva Koscina movie to watch last night and stumbled across a Giallo she did that I had never seen. So Sweet, So Dead turned out to be a rather predictable, but highly enjoyable film. The set-up is straight out of the Giallo playbook – a masked, gloved killer is butchering beautiful women. Each of the women is involved in an extramarital affair. The killer leaves pictures of the women with their lovers at the scene of each murder. The police, led by Inspector Capuana (Farley Granger), are baffled.

I wrote that So Sweet, So dead was predictable. That's to say there's not a lot of originality to the movie. The masked killer, the beautiful women, and the knife to the throat are standard fare in most any Giallo. Until the very end, the movie plays it reasonably straight without a lot of the plot twists and turns found in a lot of other Gialli. That all changes, however, in the last 10 minutes. The plot twist at the end is incredibly dramatic and left me with an uneasy, cold feeling. It completely caught me off guard. The twist was really a nice turn of events. I also want to give director Roberto Bianchi Montero (unknown to me) extra credit for creating atmosphere. For a movie like So Sweet, So Dead to be effective, you have to have atmosphere. Montero expertly ramps up the tension just prior to each kill. Nicely done.

The cast is especially strong. Granger is very good. I've always found him underrated in any movie of his I've seen. Koscina is as delightful as ever. I only wish she had played a more prominent role in more of the movie. There are a lot of gorgeous women rounding out the cast, including a brief, but welcome performance from genre fav Susan Scott. I say "brief" because she shows up, has sex, and promptly gets killed. Not a lot of screen time in this one for her.

7/10