This is just dreadful. I regret every second of the 80 minutes I spent watching this dreck. I think it's supposed to be a comedy, but I don't remember laughing much, except at a few blatant inconsistencies and downright glaring errors.
An unattractive middle-aged man called Lester meets up with rich unattractive middle-aged women via lonely hearts ads, and then murders them for the money he needs to feed his gambling addiction. That's the whole plot, and that's really all that happens. Along the way there is an attempt at intrigue when Lester starts to get phone calls from a mysterious stranger who taunts him about knowing his secret, but its so badly implemented, you may not realise what is actually supposed to be happening. The sequences in which Lester murders the rich widows are all quite brutal but also seemingly dressed up as comedies. One sequence has a woman bludgeoned with a wooden pole and then shoved into an oven. It's very cruelly depicted, but it is played out against blaring big-band waltz music, with Lester pulling faces and adopting comedy poses throughout. Another scene has the victim murdered while she constantly sings shrill opera songs...you have to see this to believe it! Actually - you don't have to see it at all, in fact I strongly recommend you avoid this flop. Fulci does not seem to know which hat he is wearing and there's no evidence of any of the flair seen in his earlier career. One sequence stood out to me as particularly wretched: the revelation when Lester suddenly realises that he has no shadow. Fulci seems unable to think up any visual representation of this phenomena on screen, so from this point on he just films the actor as normal, shadow and all!! And thus totally blows the whole angle. Either he had zero budget for effects, or he just didn't care enough to think up any way of showing it. Whatever it was, that should give you a taste of how lame this whole project is. I couldn't even understand most of the film, and there certainly wasn't anything on screen worth looking at half the time. Even the ending was as flat as a pancake. A real dud.
An unattractive middle-aged man called Lester meets up with rich unattractive middle-aged women via lonely hearts ads, and then murders them for the money he needs to feed his gambling addiction. That's the whole plot, and that's really all that happens. Along the way there is an attempt at intrigue when Lester starts to get phone calls from a mysterious stranger who taunts him about knowing his secret, but its so badly implemented, you may not realise what is actually supposed to be happening. The sequences in which Lester murders the rich widows are all quite brutal but also seemingly dressed up as comedies. One sequence has a woman bludgeoned with a wooden pole and then shoved into an oven. It's very cruelly depicted, but it is played out against blaring big-band waltz music, with Lester pulling faces and adopting comedy poses throughout. Another scene has the victim murdered while she constantly sings shrill opera songs...you have to see this to believe it! Actually - you don't have to see it at all, in fact I strongly recommend you avoid this flop. Fulci does not seem to know which hat he is wearing and there's no evidence of any of the flair seen in his earlier career. One sequence stood out to me as particularly wretched: the revelation when Lester suddenly realises that he has no shadow. Fulci seems unable to think up any visual representation of this phenomena on screen, so from this point on he just films the actor as normal, shadow and all!! And thus totally blows the whole angle. Either he had zero budget for effects, or he just didn't care enough to think up any way of showing it. Whatever it was, that should give you a taste of how lame this whole project is. I couldn't even understand most of the film, and there certainly wasn't anything on screen worth looking at half the time. Even the ending was as flat as a pancake. A real dud.