Simply Perfect

best movie i've ever seen.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Carroll Baker's second of four films with Italian director Umberto Lenzi (whose standard predilection for amusingly arty camera angles, lesbian flirtations and bare-breasted women did little to enhance his reputation as a filmmaker) is agonizingly slow and woefully overlong. A French businessman, unfaithful to the haughty wife he no longer loves, becomes infatuated with the American woman living in the apartment above his, the apparent victim of spousal abuse. The men in Lenzi's giallo productions are never required to strip below the waist, leaving his actresses looking vulnerable and used. Baker manages to stay covered most of the time, but the role doesn't require anything additional from her. Poorly-dubbed, blurry-romantic escapades among the decadent and doomed. * from ****

So Sweet...So Perverse is one of the late 60's gialli that Umberto Lenzi directed. It's an Italian variant on H.G. Clouzot's Les Diaboliques. It focuses on a couple with martial difficulties. The husband is lured into the arms of an upstairs neighbour who is being terrorised by a brutal boyfriend. But all is not what it seems.This one has a pretty good cast. The husband is the brooding Jean-Louis Tritignant (Death Laid an Egg), the wife is Erika Blanc (Kill, Baby…Kill!), the mistress is played by Caroll Baker (Baba Yaga)) and the boyfriend is the sinister Horst Frank (The Cat o' Nine Tails). Unfortunately, the film itself isn't a great vehicle for these actors. The story itself is not too engaging and there was a distinct lack of thrills and suspense in this one. In fairness, though, a lot of my frustration came from the awful copy that seems to be available of it. It was a terrible pan and scan job, that not only cuts off the sides of the picture but the top and bottom too! It means that the framing is constantly out and most of the shots are close-ups of the actors. This really effected my enjoyment of this one. I would like to revisit it when/if it is given a half-decent transfer.

Caroll Baker :from Elia Kazan and John Ford to Umberto Lanzi:what a fall!to be fair,you must underline she played opposite Nicholson -quite well- in the overlooked "ironweed" ;this is not the kind of movie Jean Louis Trintignant must be very proud of !two years after Claude Chabrol's "Les Biches " in which he slept with two bisexual women too.The first part recalls a poor man's Chabrol,depicting the luxury world of the bourgeoisie .Trintignant ,a very earnest thespian,seems ill at ease ,but the women often strip bare ,to the viewer's great enjoyment.The second part is Lenzi trying to make his own "Diaboliques" :the heroine 's first name is Nicole ,like in Clouzot's classic ;it's almost absolute plagiarism -except for the mediocre ending- ,including the "clues" Baker scatters to frighten her mate and to make her believe that her dear husband might possibly be still alive .Take Dario Argento's movies instead:their screenplays ,though influenced by Hitchcock ,are much more exciting and original.

this movie had some interesting strangeness to it but it could have been better. --possible spoiler--some of the things i favored about the movie was the creative way it showed that the bondage woman was the person causing all the mischief. however, it doesn't really explain why. there is really no explanation why the main character photographer was possessed by a witch. some other thing that caught my eye was the symbolism in her dreams... perhaps showing her guilt for causing things to happen (in the dream for instance, she punches out her friend in a boxing rink). some of the scenes reminds me of something David lynch would put into his movie.furthermore, some things are left unexplained like the hole and the nazis. maybe the hole symbolizing PLOT holes in the movie? hah.--end spoiler--but all in all, the movie had little substance. it's basically just a movie about a pretty woman photographer that gets possessed by a witch (and we do not know why the witch is doing that) and they add some strange symbolism to explain her feelings.6/10