Wonderfully offbeat film!

Am I Missing Something?

Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

This seems to have a kind of cult following due to Marisa Mell being in it, but to me the whole thing was kind of a drag that we've all seen before. I did read on the IMDB that it's missing a lot of nudity and such like, so that would have held my attention a bit better if that was included. You have Richard Conte as the old millionaire who shares a huge manor with his crazy son, who has turned mute ever since finding his mother's body following her suicide. This kid had a rather unhealthy fixation on his mother, which riled Conte, as he can only see people as objects to be bought and owned. The son, Mark, is a bit of a handful for his carers and after the last one quits, mysterious strange Marisa Mell volunteers to help, while giving Conte the glad eye. Of course, all is not what it seems as Marisa is a gold digging thief with designs on all that groovy jewellery that Conte has collected over the years (including one that he's nicked from a local nunnery that looks like the holy grail and comes with a Raiders of The Lost Ark-type crescendo on the soundtrack - what's happening?). Marisa also has a husband (Anthony Steffen) who is even more twisted and crooked than her. Can Marisa play everyone off each other and get the goodies? Once she finds Conte's dead wife's diary, she starts to formulate a plan...Maybe it would have worked better with the sleaze added in, although it's bad enough watching sixty-five year old Conte snog Mell, so I'm not speculating on what I'm missing. I don't know, I just didn't engage with it all, at least until the last fifteen minutes where a few twists finally enter the plot. I'll give it one thing - the ending was appropriately sick.

Reciving a tremendous small bundle of movies from a very kind IMDber,my first reaction when seeing the name of this title,was that the film was probably some kind of Emanuelle spin-off!.Deciding to dig a bit deeper for info,I was shocked to discovering that the film was actually a rather strange Crime Drama starring Marisa Mell.Having heard a lot about Mell's work with director Mario Bava,I decided that I would use this film to see the "Diabolik" beauty of Marisa Mell.The plot:Struggling to cope with the restless,violent behaviour of his now mute son,and also sharing the pain with his son (Richard),of his wife/Richard's mum sudden death,Alexander decides to go on the hunt for a new maid,who along with helping to keep his castle-like mansion in order,will also hopefully bring a much needed "woman's touch" to the place.Checking through all of the job ads,Alexander cant believe his eyes,when he sees an ad for a woman (Gina) who wants to be a maid and offers all the services that Alexander could ever imagine!.Arriving to the mansion with ravishing clothes and her head held high,Alexander instantly starts attempting to do some "moves" on Gina,due to her looking like a very liberated woman.Despite his best attempts,Gina firmly puts her hand down on Alexander,and tells him that she is here to work and nothing more.Feeling uneasy about having Alexander and Richard desiring to get a "piece of her",Gina soon begins to plan on "taking the mask off",when she learns the shocking secret that the mansion contains The Holy Grail…View on the film:Initially starting out with strong hints of going in the "reincarnation" route that Brian De Palma would go a year later with his brilliant Obsession,the four screenwriters, (deep breath!:Emilio Martinez Lazaro,Rafael Moreno Alba,Mario Siciliano and Manuel Mur Oti) smartly use The Holy Grail as a tantalising Maguffin,to smoothly change genres from a possible reincarnation,haunted house movie,to becoming a psychological Crime film,filled with terrificly dark backstabbing (not literally) murders.For what would be one of his last three performances,Richard Conte gives a great stubborn performance as "elder of the mansion" Alexander,who originally appearing much more sane than his son Richard, (played by a wonderfully nerving Anthony Steffen) actually turns out to be on almost the same page as him,from trying to force himself onto Gina,to deciding that the only way to "cure" his increasingly insane son,is to treat him like a dog and lock him up in a self-made cell.Backed by Conte,Steffen and co-writer/director Manuel Mur Oti obsessive focus on her beauty,Marisa Mell shines from the moment she walks up the mansion stairs,to the agonised,freeze-frame ending.Despite 8 minutes worth of racy footage being sadly cut due to the Spanish censorship of the Franco era,Mell still gives an extremely charismatic performance as the conniving and cunning Gina,who whist being seen as kind and caring on the outside,is very well shown by Mell to be someone who is always hiding a dark ulterior motive behind her beautiful,delicately chiselled face.

A young female thief (played by Euro-beauty Marisa Mell) trying to escape from her former life and her thuggish, pimp-like ex-boyfriend takes a job as a nurse for the mute, disturbed son of a cold-hearted industrialist. Both the father and son quickly fall in love with her, not surprising since she looks exactly like the father's first dead wife who he hated but his son adored. Then she finds the deceased women's diary and gets an idea how she can turn the situation to her advantage through murder. But things go very awry when the man's other illegitimate son and her old boyfriend show up. . .Only the Americans or the British would take a Spanish-Italian co-production innocuously title "La Ecadenada" and change the title to "Diary of Erotic Murderess" while at the same time cutting all the sex and nudity out! (To be fair though, the snipping could have been done by the old Franco regime who were even more prudish than the Brits and Yanks combined). What is left is not quite a giallo. It's one of Italian co-productions like "Top Sensation" or "So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious" that has suspense elements but lacks the combination of heady stylization, lurid content, and over-the-top hysteria to really make it as a giallo. The beginning is unforgivably slow--the "erotic" is non-existent, the "murders" don't occur until an hour in, so what you have left is a lot of shots of Mell reading from the "diary" in voice-over, which naturally does not good cinema make. The second half of the movie is much better and it ends with a pleasantly nasty surprise (which also, however, makes the English title a cheat in more ways than one).Marisa Mell is very good in supporting roles in movies like "Diabolik" and "One on Top of the Other", but she's a little at sea here in a role that requires her to be alternatively evil and sympathetic. Mell just LOOKS too much like a voracious maneater to play sympathetic (you might as well ask the shark in "Jaws" to be sympathetic). She handles evil a lot better, but I couldn't help but wonder what a stronger actress like Rosalba Neri or Erika Blanc could have done with this role. Still it is not a BAD movie. Maybe if it ever appears on DVD unedited and in better condition, it will be appreciated more.

Despite its seen-it-a-million-times plot concerning a sexy con artist (Marisa Mell) who inveigles herself into a wealthy old man's morbid household, this Euro psycho-thriller is just creepy enough to be absorbing for most of its running time. The old guy (played by the moribund Richard Conte, whose huge earlobes dominate his scenes) has a mute son prone to violent fits whenever reminded of his deceased mama (whom the crook, naturally, resembles). To complicate matters, there's a bastard son and an ex-husband looking for a piece of the action. Most outrageous, though, is that fact that the mansion's most valuable asset is the Holy Grail itself -- a point which is stated so matter-of-factly that one wonders about the accuracy of the translation. The plot features a few neat twists, including a final sting in its tail that will revive you if you've given up on the picture. Of course, the main reason for watching is the dissolute but utterly luscious Mell (best known for her role in Bava's Diabolik), who dominates proceedings with her intelligent grace, knockout looks and subtle ruthlessness. Unfortunately, several nude scenes have obviously been shown from the American print with equal ruthlessness.