Review: The Flower With Petals of Steel

Smug surgeon Gianni Garko accidentally kills his mistress with the title floral sculpture. Panicking and not wanting to get caught, he grinds the corpse up in a meat grinder. He thinks he’s safe, the girl has disappeared but nothing points back to him.. However, his ex Carroll Baker – the sister of the deceased – thinks Garko did something to her and isn’t shy in letting him know. Meanwhile, the cops start sniffing around and all of a sudden Garko is getting nervous. Then the threatening phone calls start, claiming to know what Garko did and threatening to expose him as a murderer (accidental or not) if financial arrangements are not made towards them. However, he’s still composed enough to be shagging his other mistress, sexy secretary Pilar Velazquez.

 

Carroll Baker was a pretty decent star in Hollywood films of the 50s and early 60s, but by the late 60s her career choices got…curious. She was appearing in all kinds of softcore exploitation films, mostly European and mostly terrible (“Orgasmo” and “Paranoia” spring to mind), plus several giallo films as well. This 1973 mystery/thriller with giallo touches from director Gianfranco Piccioli (far more prolific as a producer) is better than some of the shit Baker found herself in, but is pretty forgettable.

 

It’s good-looking and good-sounding and there’s some occasional effective creepiness. On the whole though, the unlikeable assortment of characters results in a mystery that frankly isn’t very interesting. Hell, it’s not even very mysterious so long as you’ve seen a couple of movies in your lifetime. Scripted by the director and Gianni Martucci (“Naked Girl Murdered in the Park”, a title that doesn’t leave much to the imagination), with very few viable suspects, the culprit isn’t terribly well-hidden. It’s also very slow-moving, I grew impatient. It also climaxes with the least sexy and most ridiculous underwater Sapphic sex scene you’ll ever see. Even “Emmanuelle” wouldn’t have much interest in scuba sex. The music score by Marcello Giombini (The solid spaghetti western “Sabata”, Joe D’Amato’s infamous “Anthropophagus”) is good, Carroll Baker is well-cast, I didn’t much care.

 

Subpar murder-mystery with mostly unappealing participants and a mystery that isn’t much cop. Attractive, but that’s about it. You’ve seen better.

 

Rating: C

 

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