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Title: Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (2005) |
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Review of Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key
- Director Sergio Martino and screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi are at it again with YOUR VICE IS A CLOSED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY, a gore-soaked psycho-thriller in the severed vein of their classic gialli STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH, THE CASE OF THE SCORIPION’S TALE, TORSO and ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK.
Luigi Pistilli (THE GREAT SILENCE, BAY OF BLOOD) is a burned out novelist haunted by the memory of his dead mother and making life miserable for wife Anita Strindberg (THE CASE OF THE SCORPION’S TAIL, A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN). When the failed writer’s mistress is found slashed to death, the crime initiates a series of bloody slayings that drive the protagonists to the brink of insanity… and murder.
Edwige Fenech (STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH, SECRETS OF A CALL GIRL) and Ivan Rassimov (DEEP RIVER SAVAGES, EATEN ALIVE) co-star in this atypical country-set giallo, which owes more than a passing debt to Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Black Cat" and anticipates the hyper-stylized madness of Dario Argento’s PROFONDO ROSSO and Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING.
Photographed in lush widescreen by Giancarlo Ferrando and blessed with a trippy score from Ennio Morricone conductor Bruno Nicolai, YOUR VICE IS A CLOSED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY is rife with essential 70s cinema elements: substance abuse, gratuitous sex, infidelity, incest, hippie love communes, dirtbike racing… and homicidal murder, Italian-style.
Throw away those grainy, incomplete bootlegs and substandard import DVDs. NoShame Films presents YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED DOOR AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY uncut in a pristine, widescreen, 16x9 presentation re-mastered from the original negative for the first time in America.
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Comments for Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key
- Posted on 2008-04-28
My Vice Is Watching Great Gialli Like The Ones Directed By Sergio Martino, And There Is No Treatment
"Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key" is an excellent, top-notch giallo directed by one of the masters of the genre, Sergio Martino. Martino also crafted another of my personal favorites, "The Case of the Scorpion's Tail." "Your Vice" has an excellent cast composed of gialli regulars that includes Luigi Pistilli (Mario Bava's "Bay of Blood"), Anita Strindberg (Lucio Fulci's "A Lizard in a Woman's Skin"), and soft porn queen Edwige Fenech (Giuliano Carnimeo's "The Bloody Iris"). Not only does "Your Vice" boast a top notch cast, but it also has a top notch writer, Ernesto Gastaldi, who wrote Martino`s "Torso" and Bava's "The Whip and the Body." Music was provided by Bruno Nicolai who has scored countless other gialli such as "The Red Queen Kills Seven Times," "The Case of the Bloody Iris," and "The Case of the Scorpion's Tail."
"Your Vice" is very similar to Bava`s "Bay of Blood." The plot can be summed up in one word: Greed. Most of the key characters are greedy and corrupt. They will do most anything for money. As in "Bay of Blood," there is more than one killer and the weapon of choice seems to be the curved blade of a sickle. There are also theatrical elements that are similar to Stephen King's "The Shining" and Henri-Georges Clouzot's "Diabolique" Pistilli is an abusive, alcoholic, has been writer living in a huge, crumbling villa; he is slowly losing his grip on reality. Two women, his wife and niece (Strindberg and Fenech, respectively) begin conspiring against him. Meanwhile, his beloved black cat keeps an eye on all the action from afar. Needless to say "Your Vice" is a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat." If you've read "The Black Cat," you can predict the ending. However, there are plenty of other twists to keep you entertained.
As always, NoShame films did a stellar job of restoring "Your Vice" and packaging it with plenty of extras. The film looks as though it was released in the theatres only yesterday. The photography and music are beautiful. This film contains many elements that were considered taboo in the seventies, especially the love scenes between Strindberg and Fenech. However, everything was delivered with great taste. "Your Vice" is a must have for anyone who collects Italian gialli; it is a definite keeper.
Score: 4
- Posted on 2008-04-09
It has Edwige, what more could you ask for?
if you can find a copy of this or willing to pay a bit for one, this is worth checking out. I enjoyed it. As a fan of Giallo, this is up there with the best. Edwige Fenech does a great job here, as always. I enjoyed the twists throughout the film. Poe influence is apparent and works better than most Poe inspired films.
Other recommended rare Giallo:
AMUCK!, A DRAGONFLY FOR EACH CORPSE, DEATH LAID AN EGG, FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, BODYCOUNT, DEATH KNOCKS TWICE, BODY PUZZLE, THE KILLER MUST KILL AGAIN, EYEBALL, & DEATH CARRIES A CANE.
Score: 4 - Posted on 2007-07-09
Contains the best and worst of the genre
How could I not watch this movie with a title like that? Anyway, this movie contains some of the best and worst features commonly found in giallo films. Bad: Ultra-cheesy soundtrack, poor editing, melodramatic acting, and superfluous sex/nudity. (I guess that last one could be a good thing depending on your point of view.) Some of the good things include a great location (an old Italian villa) and a solid story at its core. I liked this movie more in retrospect, but at the time, I found myself getting bored in places. The movie starts off strong, gets bogged down a bit in the middle, but ultimately finishes on a high point. In the end it evens out to a slightly above average giallo.
Score: 3
- Posted on 2007-04-30
Hacky giallo starts strong, gets bogged down in twists.
Your Vice is a Locked Room... starts strong, and I'm not just talking about the title. A headcase of a writer played by Luigi Pistilli is hosting an orgy for some of his younger neighbors. Spontaneously deciding to rape his black maid, because "maybe black women are what every man really wants," he is only interrupted in his ignoble pursuit when one of the drunken revellers begins crooning a Negro spiritual, something like "Daughter, you must be free." This stops the rape, but it has the unintended consequence of making one of the more nubile pieces of jailbait in the room jump on a table and express her "freedom" by stripping. Her reasoning? "Underneath we all look the same naked!"
It feels like Martino is setting up all kinds of feminist and racial time-bombs -- perhaps he's going to ironically express how people tend to suddenly become liberal and big-hearted when they really just want to break a sexual taboo? No such luck. Martino being Martino -- and that's a loooong way from the twin titans Bava and Fulci -- this scene leads absolutely nowhere. The rest of the movie is what you might call a bog-standard murder mystery, that would have been enlivened by an appearance in the second act by Edwige Fenech -- would have been, that is, if Fenech weren't the most cow-eyed, vacant presence of the entire giallo cycle. She must have been tupping a producer because I just don't get it. ( She is one of the many aging actresses who appears to have no memory of her own about what she did, probably because she really didn't care, and lets Quentin Tarantino do the remembering for her. )
The film's best performance is by Anita Strindberg as the brutalized wife of the writer, who apparently was the murdered girl in Fulci's Lizard in a Woman's Skin. I didn't even recognize her although I'd coincidentally seen Lizard just a day earlier and found myself breathlessly comparing it in quality to Vertigo. Anyway, how she could go, within one year, from a walk-on as a hippie teenager to a full-bodied performance like this, which rivals Margit Cartensen as the tormented lesbian in Fassbinder's Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, is more mysterious than any of the goings-on in Martino's film. She is fantastic, Medusa-like, intense, but the story lets her down.
< spoilers ahead >
What dismays me about a film like this is that, superficially, it looks so much like Lizard in a Woman's Skin with its battery of twists and the antiheroine revealed at the last moment. I worry for the sake of innocent film buffs who may not appreciate the difference between a fully-realized work of art and a glossy episode of Murder, She Wrote, which is what Your Vice... is. What makes Lizard so fascinating is that Fulci, before revealing the murderer, takes us through a series of red herrings that are like all the distractions of the 20th century -- the dream-interpretation of Freud, capitalist depredations, the neo-paganism of the crazy hippies -- only to swing it all back around, at the very last second, to the original crime, the original sin; a woman who wanted it all.
Martino attempts the same thing in this movie but he doesn't have the mind for it. The woman isn't the killer because of diabolical cleverness, but just because it's "unexpected." Real paperback stuff.
Score: 2
- Posted on 2007-01-28
SERGIO MARTINO'S BEST!!!
I know you Torso and Scorpion's Tail fans will disagree, but this is Martino's best giallo. GREAT location, music, and acting. The murder scenes are wonderfully executed, and Edwidge Fenech is HOT in her first villainous role. And the cries of the black cat! Creepy! Is it alive or dead? Great giallo. Period.
Score: 5