Death Smiles on a Murderer Directed by Joe D’Amato (1973)
D’Amato is such an awful director that he’s perfect for softcore nonsense like Laura Gemser’s Emmanuelle films. The gore (and snuff) elements help sleaze up an all ready bloated bounty of flesh. Death Smiles is a semi Giallo, and I find at least 90% of those to be seriously dull.
In the first half of the film I actually started doing chores and walking in and out of the room. I came back in to see a woman being shot in the face with a raw hamburger gun (they really had a crack FX team handle this one). I think it was the same people who handled the chop meat coconut smushing effect on Porno Holocaust! There is some kind of incest subplot with an over sized baby man with play-doh colored hair, he sort of resembles a humanoid version of Jimmy Wichard from King Of The Hill! His dead sister Greta Von Holstien (Ewa Aulin from Terry Southern's Candy), keeps coming back to life and when her face rots she resembles a Mercer Mayer monster character.
This is Joe's attempt at Poe like imagery (there is a walled up tomb and a black cat even escapes the wall). D'Amato's sloppy effort to get classy, comes off pretty stale and flavorless! He's tried to branch out many times and tackle other genre's, but always falls back on his career as a pornographer and is great at it! So why change? Keep in mind a few years later he would re-invent the Emmanuelle series, but before that he directed Emmanuelle's Revenge with his trusty work horse/main star George Eastman. Death Smiles is one of his early films and he wasn't yet the big time slimeball of porn/gore yet, but he would soon make a name for himself! The DVD has a double feature with The Torture Chamber Of Dr. Sadism (which to me is incredibly more entertaining then this dreck)!
Klaus Kinski was one of the main reasons I thought it might be fun to watch, but he barely sticks around. His character acts like Bunsen Honeydew from The Muppets as he mixes vials of colorful liquid. Toward the end of the film an audible record needle is heard for at least 20 minutes and doesn’t let up. This would be some kind of film recorded embarrassment for anyone else, but for Joe it's a mild achievement! just chalk is up to art for arts sake? you figure it out. Skip this and watch the other film on the DVD.There's a link on Youtube to watch this, for insomniacs only who need some rest!
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