This above-average giallo starts out rather shockingly with a little girl at a ski resort sledding down a hill--at the bottom of which a female figure in black unceremoniously bludgeons her to death, seemingly at complete random. Then George Lazenby plays a man vacationing in Venice with his own little redheaded daughter; the wife and mother (Anita Strindberg) is elsewhere. We immediately perceive that the same sinister individual is stalking this girl, too, and that ends badly. So the majority of the film is Lazenby's attempt to avenge his daughter and find the killer, Strindberg soon joining him. There's the usual array of suspicious characters who turn up en route, including Adolfo Celi and Fassbinder regular Peter Chatel.
This doesn't utilize the Venice setting as richly as some later films ("Don't Look Now" seems to have really alerted filmmakers to its potential), and there isn't much in the way of explicit violence, let alone nudity. Still, the movie has real atmosphere and tension, along with solid performances. It feels less purely exploitative than many films in the genre, as somehow it has a little more emotional heft--maybe because it's rooted in acute parental grief, and the horror of a child's death. Though needless to say, the death toll soon encompasses other age groups. It's a very well-crafted movie with a particularly eerie Ennio Morricone score.
This doesn't utilize the Venice setting as richly as some later films ("Don't Look Now" seems to have really alerted filmmakers to its potential), and there isn't much in the way of explicit violence, let alone nudity. Still, the movie has real atmosphere and tension, along with solid performances. It feels less purely exploitative than many films in the genre, as somehow it has a little more emotional heft--maybe because it's rooted in acute parental grief, and the horror of a child's death. Though needless to say, the death toll soon encompasses other age groups. It's a very well-crafted movie with a particularly eerie Ennio Morricone score.