‘There was a man in the corridor with a strange face!’

A group of young party animals decide to spend a wild weekend at the isolated castle where one of them lives. One of the girls brings along her psychic boyfriend, who predicts gloom and disaster. Sure enough, it’s not long before someone is murdered…

Early Giallo thriller that owes a lot to the whodunnit ‘closed circle’ mystery popularised by Agatha Christie. Sure enough, we’ve got the lonely location miles from anywhere; no-one can leave because all the cars are locked up and people start dying one by one. This black and white example from Italy was directed by Jean Josipovici and Ambrogio Moltenim and written by Josipovici and Giorgio Stegani.

It’s taken quite a while for his friends to persuade handsome Riccardo (Michel Lemoine) to invite them back to his ancestral pile for tea and biscuits, and no wonder! They are just so wild and untamed! On the way, they drive their cars really quite fast and stop every now and then to run recklessly about, giving the girls piggybacks and throwing them through the air! No wonder Lemoine’s attractive housekeeper Caterina (Luisa Rivelli) is less than impressed when they arrive to party. After all, dancing to records and snogging quickly follows!

‘Let’s party!’

Things get even more out of hand when man-eating loose cannon Serena (Antonella Lualdi) makes the scene, bringing along new American boyfriend Anthony (John Drew Barrymore). She starts by getting all the girls to dance to crazy ’45 single ‘Sexy Party’ (the film’s funniest moment) and then starts breaking up the established couples by encouraging them to play naughty psychological games.

To cap all of this, it turns out that Barrymore is a psychic! He accurately relates the history of the owner of a makeup case just be holding it, and goes on to tell the future by staring into the flame of a single candle. Unfortunately, the future ain’t bright – it’s evil! The men will see themselves from above and the women will change appearance and go back in time. Barrymore exits stage left, advising everyone to do the same but, of course, they take no notice. A little while later, Lualdi turns up strangled on the fourposter, and the party is really on…

This is not a bad film, but there are some significant flaws which impact negatively on the audience experience. The main problem is with the characters on display. Simply put, the men are loud, arrogant and annoying, and the girls are loud, giggly and annoying. Their ‘madcap’ antics in the film’s first half are loud and annoying. To make matters worse, none of them are sufficiently well-drawn to stand out from the rest, so it’s hard to care about their eventual fates. Nicoletta is the new girl, Luciana wears glasses, Sergio is a bit shy, Edie is an airhead and Paolo has a gambling problem, and so on. That’s about as deep as it gets. Really, you just can’t wait for the killer to get to work (and yes, he/she does take their damn time about it).

Although the mystery’s conclusion makes perfect sense, there’s not a great deal of surprise to it, and it turns out there was a lot less going on than you thought there might be. This lack of creativity is reflected throughout the story. On arriving at the castle, all the cars are locked away in an old garage that can only be opened by one key. Lemoine leaves the key on a ledge just outside the door and points it out to everyone. Hey, I wonder if that’s going to be significant? He also enjoys a submissive sexual relationship with housekeeper Rivelli (which turns out to have no significance whatsoever), and the two make veiled hints about his hidden motive in inviting all his friends over. We never find out what it was, but, hey, it makes him look really suspicious, right?

‘Hang on for a moment, girls, I just need to do something suspicious…’

Unfortunately, the filmmakers seem more than a little determined to set Leomine up as the killer and end up taking this much too far in the story’s later stages. Although undeniably handsome, under certain lighting the actor does look a little strange, and that is more than sufficient for the audience to doubt his innocence. However, we also get him contaminating the crime scene by wandering around holding the murder weapon (a scarf), pulling silly faces and carrying on without due care and attention.

There’s also a sprinkling of some of the usual ‘old dark house’ cliches, such as the sinister groundskeeper/servant, the dodgy fuses and a moving bookcase that hides a secret passage. Despite knowing there’s a killer on the loose, people persist in going off on their own and creeping about in the dusty passageways. However, there is an amusing sequence when Vittoria Prada gropes around on the floor for her lost glasses, foreshadowing the actions of Velma from many a ‘Scooby Doo’ cartoon!

Barrymore was the father of Hollywood leading lady Drew Barrymore and a member of an acting dynasty that goes back to the early days of cinema and the Broadway stage of the 1880s. He emerged fairly quickly as the black sheep of the family, having issues with substance abuse and many runs in with the law. He was variously incarcerated for drug possession, domestic violence and public drunkeness, and his career finally petered out in the mid-1970s. In this film, he’s saddled with an odd, floppy blonde hairstyle but gives a perfectly adequate, if surprisingly, brief performance, probably recruited simply as a device to sell the film in America.

A reasonable enough picture, but one that fails to strike any significant sparks.