KNIFE OF ICE
Director: Umberto Lenzi
Original / Alternate Titles: Il Coltello di ghiaccio, Silent Horror
Rating: UR
Running Time: 91 minutes
Description: I like Umberto Lenzi. I know that if you go on the imdb and look up his titles, you will see over and over again people criticizing his films as being boring, or outrageous, or disjointed, or whatever, but I like Umberto Lenzi. I think his dialogue is extremely (and usually unintentionally) hilarious, his situations are creatively crazy, and his films as a whole are underrated. Except this one.
This giallo is an extremely odd entry into the genre for more than a few reasons. First - unlike most every other Lenzi flick I’ve seen - there is no nudity, and nearly no blood. “What the? I thought this was a giallo,” you’re probably asking your self. I was asking my self the same thing as I watched… where is the skulking killer POV? Where is the liberally flowing red-paint blood? Where are the tits??? Not here. Actually, the most horrific images in the entire film are in the opening sequence; shots of a real bull fight, with a real bull being killed. I realize that if I were Spanish, this probably wouldn’t have bothered me so much, but as I am a friend to animals, and a person who just doesn’t like the REAL gore, I found these opening shots to be 10 times more appalling than any other images in this film.
KoI follows a mute, Martha (Carroll Baker) who is afraid of trains. Yes, afraid of trains… because (as is explained in some really heavy-handed exposition towards the beginning of the flick) she was thrown out the window of a moving train by her father just before it crashed, and she then watched as her parents burnt to death. She hasn’t spoken since. She converses on the telephone by tapping the receiver, and somehow everyone knows that it’s her on the other end of the line, and can interpret what she is saying (an even more impressive feat, I think, then people understanding Lassie when she tells them little Timmy has fallen down the mine shaft), and in person she usually uses her own sign language (again that is understandable to those that know her).
The “carnage” (I put that in quotes because, really, there isn’t much to qualify as such) starts when Martha grows some balls and goes to the - gasp! - train station to pick up her cousin, Jenny (Ida Galli), a singer who has come to visit Martha and their Uncle Ralph (George Riguad). That evening, Jenny is killed in the garage, and the viewers get the only glimpse of the “black glove” archetype seen in this film. Nearly immediately suspicion is put on “a sex maniac,” as another girl is found dead just down the road. Jenny and Martha caught a glimpse of a man with crazy eyes peeping on them on their way home from the train station, and creepy-eyes shows up again at Jenny’s funeral. So it must be creepy eyes, and to make it even worse for our ocular-deficient possible killer, he’s a British-Satanist-hippie-junkie. Yup, a Satanist hippie. Free love and goat entrails. Morphine and black mass. For some reason, that just doesn’t gel for me.
While I really do love me some Lenzi flicks, this one lives up to the imdb opinion of Umberto. Slow, ridiculous, tedious, and really, not a whole lot of fun. Every time I thought it was about to get better, KoI let me down. There wasn’t even much of the unintentionally amusing dialogue that I look forward to in Lenzi’s usual fare. The “red herrings” in this flick made no sense, and then ending “twist”… really? That’s the killer? Really? Well, if you say so, Umberto.
1.5 out of 5 British-Satanist-hippie-junkies
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