Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Did you people see the same film I saw?

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

It comes with great relief that I can just say right here and now that Telly Savalas is the murderer in this film. It's a different kind of Giallo, and made by Alberto De Martino, which usually means there's no cause to get too excited.This one starts with actress Anne Heywood arriving in Bruges to attend dress rehearsals for her new play. At the station, she pauses to make a phone call and suddenly makes eye contact with Telly Savalas, who seems to be stalking a diplomat. Anne faints and Telly high tails it, but something's going on for sure as when Anne wakes up she can't remember anything that's happened in the previous five years! Her sister, fellow actor Thomas, and husband George are a bit put out by this, even though it happened before when her boyfriend Peter died in a car accident five years previous. Anne can't remember nothing, not even being married as she thinks Peter is still alive and is taking part in MacBeth, not Lady Godiva as the theatre group are planning. It doesn't help that Peter's sister is in charge of everything and a total bitch. Of course, Telly realises that she may have witnessed him up to no good and resolves to take her out...Alberto De Martino is a competent director whose only fault is that his films are very slowly paced. For example, the first murder in this film occurs at one hour and seven minutes into the film! On the other hand, his films always contain scenes that kind of catch you off guard, like the goat rimming bit in The Antichrist or for a better example, the parts of this film where Anne has flashbacks that present her as a mad killer, or may just be parts of a play she starred in. This is quite effective to be honest as I hadn't a clue what was going on.Kojack is pretty good in this as he seems pretty bemused by the absurdity of the situation, and even shocks when he kicks a guy to death who had merely come to ask how he was getting on with killing that diplomat. Anne and Telly get involved in a pretty good cat and mouse situation at the end which results in a nasty end for Telly, plus further ridiculous revelations that can only occur in Italian films.

A theater actress (Anne Heywood) recognizes a thuggish hired killer (Telly Savalas) on the street and faints. When she comes to, she is suffering amnesia, having forgotten that has happened for the last five years since right before she witnessed her wealthy former boyfriend being murdered. This is a problem both for her husband of the past three years and for her theater company since she has the lead in their latest play ("Lady Godiva", quite convenient, of course, for a cheesecake-happy giallo film). The amnesia plot has obviously been done to death both within the giallo genre (i.e. "Eye in the Labyrinth", "Puzzle")and certainly outside it. Still this manages to add some new twists. At one point, the heroine has vague memories of being in bed with one of her male co-stars. Thinking they were lovers, she agrees to go to bed with him again in order to jog her memory, only to realize at the last moment (and to the poor guy's chagrin) that the memory is actually that of a scene in play they did together earlier! Meanwhile, the killer has also recognized her. He accidentally kills her sister, and he then comes after her. Anne Heywood was kind of like a British version of Carroll Baker in that she started out in fairly respectable roles when she was younger (like "Black Narcissus"), but by middle age found herself appearing (usually sans clothing)in a lot of sleazy Italian exploitation flicks. This movie is not nearly as sleazy as some of her other Italian films like "Ring of Darkness" (where she has a naked catfight with the actress playing her teenage daughter). And her sleaziest film was actually a American production "The Shaming" (where she plays an interracial rape victim who falls in love with her rapist). Telly Savalas is great here as always, even if he doesn't have much more to do than look menacing. The director Alberto DeMartino is definitely not one of the great Italian directors, but his movies are always entertaining.I really like the giallo genre so I may be a little kind to films like this. But even among the nearly two hundred gialli I've seen now, I'd rank this one solidly in the middle of the pack.

Scenes from a Murder is a fairly rare giallo that I felt fortunate to have found in a used video store. The movie stars the uber-cool Telly Savalas as a stalker. The woman he's after has amnesia and has trouble remembering simple things like where she lives or that her lover died five years previous. For whatever reason, her family and friends allow her to wander aimlessly around the city. For the first 2/3 of the movie, that's pretty much all we get – a woman with amnesia stumbling around the city with the every present Savalas close behind. It's not very exciting and not very entertaining. It's not until the final third that anything really happens. The scenes of Savalas close on the woman's heels through an abandoned sound stage are effective but account for far too little of the movie. These scenes and the final revelation keep this from being a completely wasted experience.

This Giallo by Alberto De Martino, who made a very watchable and entertaining "The Exorcist" rip-off in 1974 ("L'Anticristo" aka "The Tempter"), boosts Anne Heywood in the female lead role as a woman that suffers amnesia after she sees the killer of her husband again five years after the murder, and Telly Savalas as the cold-blooded assassin who tries to kill her before she regains her memory.The idea is nice, but De Martino's direction is a little bit too slow and, especially in the first half of the film, the flow of the scenes sometimes looks hacked up in a way, so it's difficult not to use the fast forward button on one's VCR. The second half is better and the film becomes a passable thriller, while the climax itself with the uncovering of the person who contracted the killer five years ago remains the best moment of the whole picture.All in all a mediocre, rather anemic Giallo. Savalas also acted in De Martino's mafia actioner "I Familiari delle Vittime non Saranno Avvertiti" aka "Crime Boss" aka "New Mafia Boss" of the same year, which also doesn't belong to the best films of its genre.