1971 ‘Il diavolo a sette facce’ Directed by Osvaldo Civirani
Carroll Baker plays a dual role as translator Julie Harrison and her twin sister Mary. The serpentine plot begins as Julie tells her lawyer Dave Barton (Stephen Boyd) that Mary's life is being threatened in London while Julie herself is being stalked by a mysterious stranger in Amsterdam.
The Devil Has Seven Faces, Bloody Mary, Der Teufel hat sieben Gesichter, The Devil With Seven Faces, Die Diamantenlady, El diablo tiene siete caras, O Diabo das Sete Faces
Italy
Italy
Please read: I’m going to destroy your giallo canon to understand this film’s significance. Recently, Luigi Cozzi said for an interview on “Five Women for the Killer” that “Bird with the Crystal Plumage” wasn’t an immediate success in Italy. “Cat o' Nine Tails” was the successful film and led to “Bird” being re-released. If he’s correct, the Argento Giallo boom should then be traced back to Cat. Every giallo in 1970-71 deserves a new context and even giallo after like “Death with Seven Faces” (from December 1971). This film isn’t great, but its existence as a giallo post-Cat carries the overlooked history of the genre.
This is giallo: female-centered, jet-set, and melodramatic. It signifies that even post-Cat, producers thought it…
When your giallo has car chases, diamond heists, attic corpses, twin swaps and someone getting run over by a front-end loader it shouldn't be a tediously dull affair, but The Devil has Seven Faces is just that, and to top it off the gialli queen of blandness herself, Carroll Baker, is our lady at peril for this entry.
It's not that this is a "bad" movie per se, even if the writing and editing leave a lot to be desired, it's just that there's nothing even remotely exciting about it. If your 90 min film has me checking my watch 45 min in, and every 10 min thereafter, something is broken in either your narrative or your execution...or both. It…
Nothing like a horrible YouTube gaillo to put you to sleep after a long days work. I put this on because it was only 90 minutes and I wasn't up to anything longer than that. This thing felt 5 hours long. The score sounded like they dropped a toddler with a xylophone into the studio and told him to "do work". I don't know what Seven Faces has to do with anything because the murderer was just a guy in a gorrila mask. TWO faces, the Devil has two faces.
In my little corner of LBd, we really, really love Carroll Baker and Jorge Hilton. We love them even if they do crappy movies. And then when they both star in the same 1971 caper, we get excited. And when Carroll plays the double role of identical twin sisters, we roll our eyes a little bit, but we still love it a lot (even with her unfortunate hair helmet).
Because even if the movie is crappy, it still makes me feel good!
An Italian crime film with Carroll Baker getting stalked by a gang of jewel thieves. The script is far too convoluted, but in a bad clever way and don't really add enough intriguing situations. The interior scenes seem very unengaging which limit how the Baker situation can develop. Some of the action beats shoot on location are better, but this is pretty much for Italian exploitation completists only.
Wow, this is bad. I just didn't like any of these characters. It was slow as hell with no suspense. The posted is 10x more exciting. And I guessed both twists in the first 5 minutes.
A moving having twists and turns, crosses and double crosses is fine, but unless it comes together in a satisfying way it can be a real waste if time. DEVIL WITH SEVEN FACES falls squarely in that category.
I get the overall plot but following it through the movie is a fool's errand. The filmmakers don't help it with its weird cutting and continuity lapses. At times I felt like the film reels got scrambled.
The major issue I had is with the wigs. At times our lead has obviously short styled hair and in the next scene it is long and flowing. At one point she is wearing an ill fitting blue wig?!?. Let's not even get started with…
A (sort of) giallo / eurocrime set partially in the Netherlands! Surely the killer will use a stroopwafel to kill someone, murder by windmill, there will be a chase by bicycle and a casual stroll through the red light district or any of the other things us Dutch people are normally associated with. But no... nothing of the above, what we do get is a whole lot of scenes in an office with people talking to a red batphone.
Clocking in at 86 minutes, the movie feels at least twice as long. There is not much of interest going on and the film just drags. The Dutch setting is great however and it is fun to recognize the places I've…
This isn't a movie. It's some kind of challenge, a dare if you will. It's a mishmash of generic thriller tropes pieced together with a mind-numbingly hypnotic late 60's adult contemporary muzak score. Sitting through it and remaining conscious without some kind of distraction is a herculean challenge. Sitting through it without alcohol is possibly deadly.
Italiano Montho #25
With a title like this you'd be forgiven for thinking that this movie was a Giallo, but it's not. Instead it's a muddled story of Carroll Baker's character who one of a pair of identical twins who gets entwined with a lawyer (Stephen Boyd) and a race car driver (George Hilton) and a bunch of criminals who are in search of a stolen diamond.
And when I say muddled, what I really mean is that it's an unholy mess of a movie which doesn't even have the good grace to sit down at the end, like any self respecting Italian mystery film of it's era, and explain just what the hell has been going on.
I don't…
It's Giallo Friday, Sevens week! Part one is The Devil with Seven Faces. Duh-dah-loo-la lady singing over the opening credits, check. Another Carroll Baker film, and you can tell she's phoning it in right away from the, uh, phone scene. Boy, that's a big wig and a huge shot of racism early on. 20 minutes in I can tell this is another giallo with no rad kills. The whole thing feels like a poorly edited TV pilot, but there's so much padding too - phone calls, overlong half-clothed interrogations, characters asking each other the same questions over and over, the lawyer flirting with women, half-assed chase scenes for both humans and cars, etc. Nice windmill, I guess. Boring with no payoff. This gets a whole star for two reasons: creative use of CAT equipment and the extremely funny bad blue wig. But only just.
