A gym teacher and Italian professor at a girls’ high school, Enrico Rosseni (Fabio Testi), is out on a river with his student/lover, Elizabeth (Cristina Galbó), when the lover sees a girl being chased on the river bank. Rosseni is dismissive, but when he hears a news report about the body of a girl being found by the river the next morning, he realises he’s gotten himself involved in a murder, and finds himself under the watchful eye of Inspector Barth (Joachim Fuchsberger) of the Scotland Yard. Then more young girls are found brutally murdered and Inspector Barth’s and Rosseni’s investigations lead them to an overwhelming question: What did they do to Solange (Camille Keaton), and how exactly is it connected to the murders?
Posts Tagged ‘Camille Keaton’
Tragic Ceremony (1972)
Before hitting the big time, such as it was, in Day of the Woman (Zarchi, 1978), Camille Keaton spent several years in Italy making low-budget movies such as this one, which has the lovely, giallo-tinged original title Extracts from the secret archives of a European capital’s police force.
The plot concerns three ostensibly British gentlemen and a girl (at least, the script seems to think it’s set in Britain, given the references to the Scotland Yard): Bill (Tony Isbert), a rich boy with a mommy complex; Joe (Máximo Valverde) and Fred (Giovanni Petrucci), a couple of working-class guys who are seemingly just out to scam some money from Bill; and Jane (Camille Keaton). The relationships between our heroic quartet is never made clear, except that all the boys seem to be infatuated with young Jane. And really, who can blame them?
I Spit on Your Grave (1978)
In 1974, Meir Zarchi and his eight-year-old daughter were driving to a park when they saw a woman crawl naked out of the bushes. The woman had been raped by two men and Zarchi helped her to the police, where they had the misfortune of running into a singularly unhelpful police officer. It was this episode that inspired Zarchi to write and direct Day of the Woman. While the very fact that Zarchi chose to make a B-movie about rape is exploitative, in its first release, Day of the Woman wasn’t marketed as exploitation and didn’t create much controversy, but went mostly unnoticed. However, the film was re-released in 1980 as I Spit on Your Grave and sold on its, not insubstantial, exploitation trappings.





