Review: Blackmail

Bad girl Brigitte Skay, her boyfriend Benjamin Lev and their no-good hippie friends hatch a plot to rip-off her wealthy, straight-laced father (Umberto Raho), who has remarried to a younger woman (Rosalba Neri). The idea is to stage a kidnapping of Skay, but as often is the case, what seems like a sure-fire scam quickly unravels.

 

Deathly dull 1974 Italian thriller from writer-director Luigi Batzella (who gave us the cult classic “Nude for Satan” as well as “The Devil’s Wedding Night”) wastes the talents (and everything else) of Brigitte Skay and especially and dreadfully underused Rosalba Neri. You’d expect some good saucy, crazy fun from the guy behind “Nude for Satan”, but alas even the near constant nudity from Brigitte Skay isn’t enough to make up for all the thumb-twiddling you’re going to be doing waiting for it to go anywhere. For a film running less than 80 minutes, it feels like an eternity to get to not much of anything at all. It’s also more crime flick than horror/giallo pic, and a pretty bargain basement one at that.

 

The characters are all thoroughly detestable, these hippies couldn’t plan and organise a crime if their lives depended on it. They’ve not got the brain matter. We do get some Sapphic action, but it surprisingly doesn’t involve Neri, and is quite possibly the most random lesbian sex scene in cinematic history. Unfortunately, everyone in front of and behind the camera seems completely stoned and it ends up no fun at all. Capped off by the absolute worst kind of twist ending you could imagine. Yeah, that one. They really do it. What a total rip-off.

 

This is awful. A waste of time, talent, money, celluloid – you name it. Really cheap-looking and deservedly forgotten by the winds of time. Even Rosalba Neri completists are better off sitting this one out. Even the sex is awful.

 

Rating: D-

 

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