Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972)

The never-ending cycle of becoming engrossed in new and personally unexplored genres and sub genres continues.  It was over two years ago that I stumbled upon the lovely German actress Helga Line, whose beauty and screen presence thrust me into the world of B-movies (even more specifically Sword and Sandals, Euro-Horror and Euro-Spy films). Almost exactly two years later another lovely German born actress by the name of Barbara Bouchet hooked me on the cult genre of Italian thrillers, or giallo.  If you told me three years ago I'd be a fan of low budget Italian films I'd laugh hysterically, now it's a strange reality.

Summary

A series of killings begin to strike a bizarre trend as multiple women are found dead with a silver half moon medallion clutched within their cold lifeless fingers.  It's not until one woman survives an attack that the pieces of the puzzle begin to be gathered together as her husband investigates the series of killings and is able to arrive at a common thread, relating the killings and giving them an idea of who might be next.

The Good

• The Flow - Being the third giallo film I've watched Seven Blood-Stained Orchids is by far the best flowing storyline of the three.  Immediately the film kicks off with the murder of multiple characters and manages to carry that suspense all the way to the end of the film.  My biggest complaint about the other two films I've seen were the incredibly slow pace they seemed to move at with only a 90 minute run-time, not so here.

• The Women - Beautiful actresses are one of the defining ingredients of any Italian thriller and this film packs them in with five pretty popular giallo actresses of the time: Uschi Glas, Rossella Falk, Marina Malfatti (was also in The Red Queen Kills Seven Times), Gabriella Girogelli, and Marisa Mell. 

• The Dubbing - Asian cinema has given dubbing a horrible name, but so far I have nothing but compliments in regards to the Italian's dubbing quality.  I rarely noticed the film was dubbed at all until a word or two gets lost in translation and sounds a little corny, other than that it's a blessing to not have to read subtitles and to not have a film butchered by bad out of sync dubbing.

The Bad

• Poisoned Cats - With not a whole lot wrong with the film I have to nitpick a few certain aspects within the story.  One of those being the murder of Marina Malfatti's (who plays Kathy Adams) cats.  Yes, she gets snuffed too but disturbingly enough I felt worse about the three helpless cats being poisoned by the murderer, especially when they cry out in pain.  Definitely a scene that sticks with you long after the film is over.

• Killer's Identity - I won't spoil the film by revealing who the killer is, but I felt slightly cheated when it turned out to be a person in the same profession as the killer in another giallo film I'd seen (and I've now only seen three).  I hope this isn't the beginning of a trend, if so I could begin to see these films getting overly predictable.

The Amusing

• Antonio Sabato - Sabato plays the main character, Mario, whose wife is attacked by the killer and survives.  Mario takes it upon himself to investigate the murders and hunt down the killer while the police seem less than enthusiastic about putting in any real detective work.  I simply found Sabato in this film amusing because I've always heard his son's name (Antonio Sabato Jr.) tossed around usually in reference to him being somewhat of a joke of an actor, Sabato Sr. isn't too bad though.

8/10