Amuck!
Cast: Farley Granger, Barbara Bouchet, Rosalba Neri, Umberto Raho
Just minutes before watching Silvio Amadio's Amuck! I pretty much had the same expectations upon the film as anyone. Just another old grey Italian thriller stuffed with uninspired sex and violence, I thought. Not so. Wrong again. Amuck! is not just another potboiler, but another hidden jewel, a pure grain of exploitation gold. A real surprise well worth tracking down.
Genre regular Barbara Bouchet (Don't Torture a Duckling) is Greta, a young girl who arrives to her new secretary job at the house of a weird writer (Farley Granger) and his wife (shaped like Rosalba Neri), whose previous secretary has mysteriously disappeared. It turns out that she was also Greta's friend and soon Greta is trapped in a very dangerous game of sex and drugs. Someone's death is obviously unavoidable and it gets pretty hairy from there on.
The plot is set on the countryside, near some gloomy swamp, which makes for a nice change. But the best thing about the film is the wonderfully claustrophobic Polanski-like atmosphere. Some scenes are almost hypnotic surreal, like one where an eminently big-sized care-taker skins an eel in gross detail and at the same time looks deep (deep) up the skirt of Bouchet who sits watching in front of him, accompanied by some unearthly music from Teo Usuelli. Scenes of such pure superb brilliance, mixtured with flashbacks and, for some reason, delirious clips from some sex film (best described as Little Red Riding Hood for adults) they're watching in order to get high, makes the film an odd treat. Simple exploitation no doubt, cheaply made, but that's not necessarily a minus. Someone at the helm knew what he was doing.
© The Inzomniac's Movie Madness Review.