Released in Italy with the far better title Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence. A masked, hacksaw wielding killer is preying on female students at an Italian University. With each murder we see a brief flashback to a child’s hand mutilating a doll. The killer molests their breasts after death. Daniela starts to believe she is even more at risk because she recalls seeing someone wearing the same red and black scarf the killer used to strangle one of the victims. She can’t remember who was wearing the scarf but it is only a matter of time before she recalls his face. Her and her friends hole up in an isolated mountain top villa. Unfortunately the killer has followed them. Suspicion is mainly aimed at a boy who has a crush on Daniela. Towards the end the film improves, with Jane (Suzy Kendall) waking to discover all her friends murdered and watching them being dismembered. However, because she had featured so little until this point in the film, I found it hard to care for the character or her plight, though the scene still managed to be the most tense of the movie. Lamely, her survival rests on the intervention of a male hero. The murderer is revealed to be a random character from earlier in the film but we are given the full flash back of a child’s death involving a doll explaining the motive, which was my favourite part of the film. While it seems cliché now, the film came out before most American slasher films like Friday the 13th (though after The Last House on the Left) but while keeping that in mind, the storyline is still bad, the gore is unrealistic, the dubbing is poor and the film is cheesy and mostly ineffective in achieving scares, though it’s still a better film than most giallos. The music by Guido and Maurizio DeAngelis is stereotypical but effective.
Available for the first time uncut in the UK now thanks to Shameless Films but also available uncut in the US thanks to Anchor Bay
2.5/5
