The second of our forgotten gialli is, alas, not as good as the first. I feel like the fundamental problem here is that this isn’t an Italian movie at all — it’s Spanish. Can the Spanish make giallo? Well, not on the basis of this movie, they can’t.

I mean, I can see why this gets classed as one: It’s got the black-gloved, razor-slice killings; it’s got a plot where you’re trying to figure out who’s doing all the killing; there’s a lot of nudity; and it’s set in Southern Europe, so it’s like kinda geographically adjacent, at least?

But no, it’s just not right. The Spanish countryside (where this movie takes place) is not the same as Italy; it’s warm and cozy and vacationy, not unbelievably cool and gothic. There aren’t enough characters to really make the mystery difficult to solve. One big “twist” is so obvious that I’ll just spoil it right here, because nobody could be surprised: A woman keeps talking to her silent, never-moving husband who we see only from behind his chair, and — shocker — turns out he’s been dead the whole time.

So you have weak characters involved in a weak mystery that’s slow to develop, and you can’t even rely on the atmosphere to carry you, because it’s all wrong. The next movie in this set is also Spanish, and I’m crossing my fingers that it’s possible for a Spanish giallo to exist, but I’m not optimistic.