Orgasmo/Paranoia/A Quiet Place to Kill - Double Feature Movie Review
Orgasmo/Paranoia/A Quiet Place to Kill - Double Feature Movie Review
Umberto Lenzi and Carroll Baker shake it up
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Sometimes both of these movies, released in 1969 and 1970 are known as Paranoia. Sometimes one of them is known as A Quiet Place to Kill. Sometimes, the exact same actors, songs and dialogue is used in both films.
It's easy confuse them even after you've watched them back-to-back, as I did recently at a revival screening at the famous Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. Much as I like the giallo genre, director Umberto Lenzi (Seven Bloodstained Orchids) and the star Carroll Baker (Baby Doll), it was quite an endurance test. Both films are pretty good, but so very similar, that plenty of breathing room between is highly recommended.
In the 1969 film, there's a lot of cat-and-mouse character interplay as a villainous young couple sets up a newly widowed trophy wife for a harrowing home invasion. Kathryn West (Carroll Baker) arrives in Italy, trying to shed her New York gold-digger reputation and hopefully recapture her once-promising art career (she proudly displays a crudely-painted nude self-portrait in the foyer of her villa). She soon begins a sexual affair with the groundskeeper, vulgar ex-pat Peter Donovan (Lou Castel), which is quickly complicated by the arrival of his beautiful and feral "sister" Eva (Colette Descombes). At first it's a frolicsome threesome, but then things go very wrong and the circumstances force bereaved Kathryn to face death yet again.
In the 1970 film, Baker plays much the same booze-and-pills swilling ageing party girl, only this time her husband is alive and well. Make that her ex-husband (Jean Sorel, whose acting ability and good looks put him leaps and bounds beyond Castel). Playboy Maurice has remarried, but that doesn't stop him from wanting to revisit the past, if you know what I mean. Enter the current wife (Anna Proclemer) and you've got Diabolique, Italian-style.
A Quiet Place to Kill is a much more layered film than Orgasmo, but perhaps not as intense in its interpersonal dynamic. In any case, although I was already worn to the bone by its predecessor, if I had to recommend just one of these movies, I'd say it's this one: it's a bit funnier, has better fashions, and is simply stronger in its goofy giallo clichédom. (Also, it's a nice reteaming of Baker and Sorel, who were in The Sweet Corpse of Deborah.)
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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson