La bestia uccide a sangue freddo (1971)

Directed by Fernando Di Leo [Other horror films: N/A]

La bestia uccide a sangue freddo, more popularly known as both Asylum Erotica and Slaughter Hotel, is an Italian movie that came as something as a disappointment. What I was hoping would be a decent giallo with good kills turned out to be more a soft-core pornographic flick.

There’s a lot of nudity in this one, folks. Self-fondling, lesbianism, nymphos, a little bit of everything besides male nudity. 😛 The story’s simple enough: at a secluded clinic for women, a killer proceeds to whack off quite a few people. With various suspects and red herrings, will they discover who is behind these heinous acts?

Well, that’s not completely accurate. It’s not until 75 minutes into the movie that anyone knows there’s a killer on the loose, and once the police get there, there’s only ten minutes left in the movie. In fact, the whole ending seemed rather rushed. Not that it’s a bad thing – rushed action is better than no action at all, and to tell you the truth, I got tired of the sex and self-fondling a few minutes into the first sequence. But they keep on coming (wink wink).

And when we do get kills, they’re not overly inspired. Sure, the crossbow kill was pretty cool, and the iron maiden death was decent, but everything else just fell flat. For Pete’s sake, there’s a bloodless decapitation in the movie. We can’t have such an utter lack of gore like this and expect much of the kills to be memorable. For most of the film, I was just bored with the red herrings and consistent nudity, truth be told. While the ending was rushed, along with the explanation of why the murderer is offing people, at least we got some type of payoff for our troubles. A pretty tedious flick, but if a lot of nudity’s your thing, give it a go.

6/10