1971, Italy
Original title: La bestia uccide a sangue freddo
Alternative title: Cold Blooded Beast
The giallo’s obsession with mentally unstable women gets a virtual smorgasbord of neurosis in Fernando Di Leo’s sleazy thriller (which would seem like a giallo parody if it didn’t come so early in the cycle).
You know exactly what to expect when Klaus Kinski is the doctor at an asylum full of suicidal nymphos.
In true giallo fashion all the women are beautiful, wealthy and lazy, and the hospital is a labyrinthine old country house full of openly accessible vintage medieval weapons, as well as an iron maiden (not actually a medieval invention but often catalogued as such), making it the perfect setting for a bodycount movie.
And what bodies they are.
There’s Mara (Jane Garret in her only known role), the agoraphobic orphan who responds more to the lesbian advances of her weird nurse than to her electroshock treatments; Ruth, the homicidal housewife (Gioia Desideri, who surprisingly never played a transvestite in a Nazi exploitation film); Cheryl (Margaret Lee), the suicidal industry magnate who longs for a ‘connection’ and finds it in dodgy doctor Klaus Kinski (who shared the screen with Lee in at least 12 films); and Anne (Rosalba Neri), the nymphomaniacal sexpot who asserts to head Doctor Osterman that, “I’m not one of those mad people who need you. I just want to make love. Make love, that’s all”, to which Osterman replies: “It’s just that your desire to make love is obsessive, compulsive. Go and take a shower.”
In the ensuing shower scene, she throws herself against the walls and writhes on the floor.
She’s been rejected by her one true love, Peter, and pours herself into meaningless sexual trysts trying to fill the emptiness left by this rejection.
Comedy music plays when she enthusiastically attempts to seduce two male nurses, who struggle to keep a straight face as she throws herself at them in a histrionic fit of sex mania.
This is not the only hilarity to be had; the killer’s belaboured breathing as he trudges up the steps and through the halls trying to decide where to go in pursuit of his victims seems like something out of Student Bodies, endless hardcore masturbation inserts shamelessly flaunt the film’s aesthetic appeal, and the mop-topped killer attacks an entire room of nurses with a mace in a bloody massacre!
Slaughter Hotel is the most plotless Di Leo film l’ve seen; the three components – the women, the asylum, the killer – functioning without a script to connect them.
Ironically, it’s based on the 1968 book The Castle of the Blue Bird by popular post-war German writer Heinz G. Konsalik, but completely drops the narrative involving the head doctor’s medical experimentation (which is meant to be its focus in favour of slobbering over a bevy of bodacious babes.
I know many people who love this film. I’m not one of them.
hexafu 