“La bestia uccide a sangue freddo” (1971)
“What else have you done? You moved the body and took away the weapon. Then you called the police, asking me to come immediately with maximum discretion, as if it were for a routine check, not for a massacre by a lunatic criminal!”
“This is too much! You’re insulting me!”
Fernando Di Leo’s “La bestia uccide a sangue freddo” (AKA: “Slaughter Hotel”) offers a bevy of curvaceous sexy women in an unfortunately close proximity to Klaus Kinski. Can mayhem be far behind? An indecisive film that wavers between wannabe giallo and pornographic sexual exhibitionism, Di Leo’s movie contains many of the expected tropes
within the particularly lurid Italian genre, yet the film is lacking in the expected stylishness for which the often vividly colorful and visual flamboyant genre is noted. The genre is also characterized by a penchant toward markedly exaggerated infusions of sex and violence, though one might hope that it might seem morally incumbent on the responsible filmmaker to avoid crossing the line rationalizing that the latter is a natural expected consequence of the former.
Befitting the rudimentary giallo formula in which the need for psychological disturbance is absolute, “La bestia uccide a sangue freddo” features an appropriately time saving setting by placing the action within the confines of a mental clinic. However, this turns out to be something of a shortcutting cheat, since ultimately the homicidal motivations of the killer have no real connection to mental illness (unless we’re willing to concede that randomly killing several people is an activity that silently acknowledges a certain level of disturbance), nor is it addressed as anything but an opportunity to voyeuristically exploit the most intimate hills and valleys of the comely roster of patients; conveniently, this clinic is suspiciously bereft of any male subjects or of any female who are not prodigiously endowed.
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