This film, released to the civilised, English-speaking world with an extremely formulaic title-Formula for a Murder-is a Very Good idea which, infortunately, is only Quite Well executed. Still, it's a valiant attempt to put a fresh-ish spin on the genre, so fair fucks to Alberto de Martino for trying.

After losing the use of her legs when she falls down a flight of steps trying (unsuccessfully) to escape a paedophile posing as a priest, Joanna suppresses the memory of the incident. She grows up to be highly skilled at an array of sporting activities, which are all seemingly part of some multi-discipline modern pentathlon-style event which doesn't actually exist IRL. Her sexy round-faced friend Ruth fulfils all her leg-based needs, and her 'coach', Craig-whose ability to teach archery, in particular, seems to be extremely limited-wants to fulfil all her between-the-leg needs. After he pesters her into accepting a marriage proposal, he moves in and Ruth moves out. Oh, and Joanna's also rich through an inheritance, though she seems to prefer donating to her own school for paraplegics and the local priests than lavishing her wealth on herself. Just as things seem to be becoming idyllic, a mysterious priest shows up and starts offing men of the cloth, before he turns his attention to Joanna. Is it a ghost from her past returning to finish the job? Or, seeing as this is a giallo, is it an inheritance-based plot? Course it is!

There might be nothing new here in terms of the general Les Diaboliques-influenced plot, but de Martino does mix things up by pulling back the curtains on the mystery far sooner than is typically the case in a giallo (with 50 minutes still to run, no less).  We're left in no doubt as to who the killer-and what their motive-is, if indeed there was any doubt in the first place (if you ever find yourself as a doctor passing on confidential  information about a medical ailment which could kill a rich person, and the person with whom you're speaking stands to gain personally from the rich person's death, and this person says, "Let me get this straight" and proceeds to repeat what you've just said back to you for confirmation, you might want to alert the authorities). 

After the revelations the film relies upon the gaps between how much we know and how little Joanna knows to generate tension. This is a solid idea, and something I myself have experimented with in scripts in the past, and it does work here to some extent. There are two areas in which the film falls down a little, however. The first is a pacing issue, with 50 minutes proving slightly too long to sustain tension; indeed, there's precious little present until the final quarter of an hour.

Instead, we're treated to a dragged out will-they-won't-they-kill-her saga, as we begin to suspect whether or not the motive is really as clear cut as first presented. This doesn't make for riveting viewing, although a detour to New York sees things pick up, with a retooled version of the New York Ripper score and those dockland ship horn foleys which graced so many Italian exploitation films of the era lending the scenes a kind of comfy familiarity. The occasions when the priest reveals himself to Joanna, with squeaky-voiced doll in tow, do occasionally work as bizarro set pieces, as does a dream sequence set in broad daylight.

The second thing which holds the film back is the talent of its director. Alberto de Martino had a real skill for dreaming up film projects, but the execution seldom failed to live up to the idea. He's not quite a hack, but at the same time he doesn't ever seem to have a firm grasp on the directorial reins. A typical example of this is the curtain* sequence. This sees Joanna dangling out of a first floor bedroom window as she clings desperately to a large curtain. The sequence could have been a sweaty-palm-inducing set piece, but de Martino's approach was to film the action from as many angles as possible, and let the editor throw something together (which he did, but not especially skilfully**).

Without being too dismissive of de Martino's directing talents, I feel that the more successful moments in his films can often be credited to the contributions of his collaborators. The brilliantly-staged (if overlong) car chase in Strange Shadows in an Empty Room, for example, is almost certainly the product of Rémy Julienne's input. The wide angled lens is probably overused here as well, although that seemed to be a common ailment in Italian films of the 80s (cf Sergio Martino's work). That's not to say that this is a particularly badly-directed film. The final shot, whoever came up with it, is one of those neat conflagrations of railings and prison bars, which shows a character in the open air who is simultaneously trapped by their past. The chase sequence which precedes this is pretty good (albeit a tad dark on DVD), and the inability of the killer to dispatch a disabled woman is presented in a relatively believable manner.

What is less believable is Joanna's repeated attempted phoning of her doctor in the midst of this chase. Sure, he's a close friend and protector, but wouldn't the police be worth calling instead/as well?  On a side note, the fact that she's able to make the call in the first place gives rise to an interesting theory, which I'll attempt to expound upon here without being too spoilerific. Basically, when the killer comes face-to-face with Joanna for the first time, she refuses to countenance their explanation for what they've done. Maybe a better way to phrase that is 'justification for their actions'. Is it a better way? Maybe, but not better enough to justify my rambling actions here. Anyway, subsequent events would suggest that the explanation/justification was so much hot air, spouted on the spur of the moment to try to worm out of a tricky situation.

Except. A clear instruction was earlier issued by the killer's co-conspirator (yes, there's a co-conspirator) to render the telephones unusable. And yet, there Joanna is, misusing the phone horribly in a pea-brained attempt to escape. Does the killer's refusal to carry out this part of the plan back up their protestations regarding mind-changing and the like? It would certainly explain the overlong stretch of film before the climax, which is chiefly due to an apparent reluctance to put the final piece of the plan into action.

Paul Naschy returns with a cracking wig on his head, and a threadbare script in his pocket, for this Spanish giallo.

A woman's clothes-wearing killer is slashing their way through Milan, leaving a dragonfly on each corpse as a memento. This practise is apparently an homage to some obscure ancient civilisation's method of dealing with undesirables, which is exactly what the killer think they're doing in Milan. That's a view actually shared by Inspector Scaporella, played by Paul Naschy as a grizzled cigar-chomping veteran with a bad comb over. Nonetheless, after some past high-profile scandals, he still has to put his sympathies aside and try to catch the killer. As the pile of prostitute and drug addict victims grows ever larger, we realise that the killer might be someone close to Scaporella. Is it his (life, not law) partner Silvana, or one of his friends, a high society lot who seem to have plenty of skeletons in their closets? 

Or, at a stretch, it might be his police commissioner; we're not exactly over-burdened with suspects here, although a couple of characters who are integral to the plot are introduced late on only to be immediately dispatched. After a while it becomes fairly obvious that  Silvana (Mrs Scaporella) isn't the killer, but exists to provide a gender politics commentary which acts as a kind of companion piece to Daria Nicolodi's conversations with David Hemmings in the same year's Profondo Rosso.* Oh, and she's also there to show her tits a couple of times.

But yeah, that pretty much leaves Scaporella's group of friends as the suspect pool. They're fleshed out to varying degrees, but no matter what way you spin it, the end reveal isn't overly shocking or exciting.** There are probably too many victims presented, which doesn't allow much time for characterisation, or plot development. None of the murders are exactly top-of-the range set pieces either, although one, set in the clichéd (in horror films, in not gialli) environs of an abandoned fairground ride, is semi-effective.

There are some interesting touches, not least the necrophile professor character who provides both some invaluable exposition regarding the provenance of the dragonfly motif and some envelope-pushing thematic content (it mightn't be pushing it too much to see him as being representative of the Spanish ruling class fucking the rest of the moribund nation). He also commits the classic giallo error of uncovering some important informatio, and using this knowledge for attempted blackmail rather than police-assisting.

Later, another character commits the classic giallo error of uncovering the actual identity of the killer, then phoning the police to arrange a meeting so he can divulge said info. As always, he never gets a chance to impart said info, as the omniscience of the killer always seems to extend to knowing the details of such proposed meetings. 

This character then doubles down on his stupidity by blowing a second chance to finger the perp (double entendre fans should have a swell time with that sentence), when he chooses to use his last few seconds of life to indulge in an abstract portrait of the killer, instead of just writing their bloody name down. Naschy was certainly au fait with the genre anyway, as such irrationalities recur constantly. (He was also clearly a fan of Dirty Harry-style cop films, and relished any opportunity afforded him to indulge in macho gun play, to the extent that gun toting largely replaces his usual procession of sex scenes). 

As was common with Naschy films, the music is of the library variety, but again was chosen with a clear knowledge of the genre, with pieces from Mario Bava films being particularly prominent. The only drawback of this approach is that it makes us very much aware that we are not, in fact, watching a Mario Bava film, which is always a bad thing.

So, overall this isn't a great giallo. The central mystery comes up short, and the whole thing seems a bit vanilla, even with the necrophilia etc. There's a sense of Naschy and Klimovsky seeking to replicate the strange atmosphere of the Italian giallo, which seems organic to those films but imposed here (cf the Nazi gang). Still, there's plenty to enjoy (cf the Nazi gang), and Naschy is great value as always. The killer uses a dazzling array of weapons, (including golf club and umbrella***) and things are never boring. In the end, this slots comfortably into the back end of the pantheon of gialli, and, being that Naschy was clearly a fan of the genre, he can be justifiably proud of this fact.

*The near-to-climactic searching the house scene is also redolent of Profondo Rosso, albeit in a far more industrial and low budget way. It's worth noting that this film was actually shot in 1973, and sat on the shelf for a couple of years, so any resemblance is coincidental.

**There are three characters who so closely resemble each other that I'd defy you to be able to identify which one was which if you were presented with them after a viewing of the film. This may be a case of my semi-face blindness hampering me, but then again it may not be.