After a prologue featuring a WW2 Nazi planting a bomb in a room with a woman and child, an old man with a German name in 'present day' Spain turns up dead just after taking out a million dollar life insurance policy. Not only does he turn up dead, he turns up dead after taking a ghost train ride at a fairground whilst carrying a bag of cash, which has, of course, disappeared. Hotshot insurance investigator Robert Hoffmann is given instructions to find a reason not to pay out on the policy, and he immediately gets to work seducing one of the deceased Nazi's (come on-you'd worked that out, right?) daughters and inveigling an invite to their country pad. There follows dalliances with another daughter, as well as mild flirting with a widow, before things finally get going when said second daughter is killed and left naked in... her front garden.
Even though this is a fairly slow moving film, it actually contains one of the higher villain quotients - there are a huge amount of killers and plotters and stalkers, and as such the film plays like one of Edgar Wallace's less inspired stories. At the same time, the first daughter, Catherine, does get to show some dramatic chops as a character struggling with grief, even if some of the situations which bring on her bouts of sadness are fairly preposterous (why go to the fairground where your dad was murdered on a first date?).
Brescia is no-one's idea of a top of the range director, but he does make moderately impressive use of the locations here - he clearly had an in with the fairground owners, and the country pile where much of the film takes place is fairly swish, as is, for that matter, the HQ of the insurance company (which may well have been a room in said pile). A couple of nighttime stalking sequences are well done, as is (if you overlook the continuity issues and its first couple of minutes) the fairground climax. There's even a hint of ingenuity and originality in a repeated device whereby characters' faces are deliberately obscured within the frame - obviously this wasn't the first time such a technique had been used in a film, but he employs it in a manner which acts as a précis of the film, ie that it's a murder mystery which presents a series of characters, whose shady motives we have to parse to find an ultimate guilty party.
I should say 'guilty parties', for as noted there are a lot of unscrupulous and murderous folk in the mix here. As such, it's impossible to fully guess what's going on, with most of the murders being committed by a character with no connection to the main narrative 'plot', which leaves us with a bizarre situation whereby those killings actually function as red herrings of sorts. The 'plot' in question is a revenge scheme deriving from the events depicted in the film's black and white (and mismatched stock footage-heavy) prologue. It's one of several gialli which feature Nazi characters (The Bloodstained Shadow and Plot of Fear to name two others), which, along with the then-burgeoning Nazisploitation genre, suggests an attempt by the children of fascists to come to terms with (and monetise) the sins of their fathers, albeit by transplanting the locus of fascism across axis borders to Germany.
Speaking of sins of fathers, Austrian actor Robert Hoffmann's character Chris is possibly the least sympathetic giallo 'hero' ever - he's an 'amateur' sleuth in that he's not a policeman, but his motivation to solve the case is derived from his job as an insurance adjuster. He shags his girlfriend's sister and snogs her mother when she's battling some pretty heavy mental health issues (as well as being stalked by Leiland Palmer off Twin Peaks), and he's also a peeping tom (although this trait was likely included merely to justify the depiction of a tryst between two marginal characters). And that's not even the half of it...
The film does pick up steam towards the end, and overall isn't a terrible watch (although if, like me, you watch it on the Full Moon Blu then be prepared to do some serious aural straining). The narrative contains so many little twists and shimmies towards the end that it can't really resolve itself in an overly-satisfactory manner, and the lack of screen time afforded the better actors (which is, as I noted, probably the most screen time that could be afforded) can be frustrating. It also contains quite a lot less sex than you're probably expecting, but on the other hand it contains a surprising amount of smashed glass, so swings and roundabouts.*
IF YOU are an insurance company, apparently you're not liable for a life insurance policy if [SPOILERS] you sell someone a policy and then murder them.
Also, IF YOU are an Italian driver in the 1970s, as neatly demonstrated in the tailing sequence here which was clearly shot among real traffic, road markings are, at best, a vague hint.
*I wrote this review during the Covid-19 lockdown, and am posting it almost 3 years later, so I can't remember if that sign off makes sense, and refers archly to something about the film, or if it merely represents the blathering of a stir-crazed mind.