So I remarked before that Spanish gialli don’t quite seem to work. This one is also Spanish, and unfortunately it just bolsters my theory that gialli need to be in Italy to be successful.

The setup is more promising than Trauma. Instead of being in a remote country house with only a few characters, we instead have a remote country estate with a huge pile of characters (the titular thirteen guests, their host, and the servants at the estate). And they have proper giallo-style characterizations — young, handsome, brash guys; blustering old men; too-attractive cheating wives — and they all have secrets in their backstory.

But then the movie just doesn’t deliver. It’s structured around a couple of large group conversations, where they gather for dinner and the host just monologues with occasional interruption. These scenes are interminably expository, the kind of thing that would get your finger hovering over the “skip cutscene” button in a videogame. You’re really going to run through all the guests one-by-one and just tell us their secrets and salient characteristics? There’s no way you could, idk, show these things?

What with all that exposition, it was literally one hour into the (ninety-minute!) movie before we got our first kill — seeing a black-gloved hand open a door was like “ah, finally, the movie remembered it’s a giallo!” But the kills weren’t all that interesting; they didn’t have much logic behind them, and they were poorly paced — zero for the first hour, and then like three in five minutes, which is the opposite of building terror. Ideally, you’d have had characters saying and doing things, and then getting killed, and everyone reacting to that and doing different things and then more kills. Instead you just got an hour of speechifying that seemingly bored everyone (including the audience) followed by a paroxysm of pointless kills that everyone (including the audience) basically treated as just a random thing that happened.

Also also, I don’t know what the deal was with censorship in Italy vs. Spain, but this movie is weirdly prudish, but in a way that makes it feel like it was censored at the last minute. Like, there is a ton of adultery in the movie with multiple alleged sex scenes, and there are kills that happen as people are changing or taking showers or whatever, but there is zero nudity in the movie. Why would you have someone killed mid-shower if they’re going to be covered up in a towel when we show them? Were they wearing that towel in the shower the whole time? If you don’t want to put nudity into your movie, don’t write scenes that practically demand it!

(Although: One of the characters and his mom were giving real Lucille and Buster Bluth energy; another was doing a perfect Tobias Funke. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the characters were also never-nudes.)

I liked this more than Trauma, but that’s a low bar to clear. Fortunately, the next volume of Forgotten Gialli takes us back to Italy; my fingers are crossed for a return to proper Italian trash.