This is the fourth film of Joseph (the Anglicized version of Jose' Ramon) Larraz I'm watching and possibly the most conventional and least rewarding so far. For the record, the film shares its screenwriter Derek Ford (who later became an exploitation director himself) with a film I've also just watched for the first time during this Halloween challenge Peter Sykes' VENOM (1971; see above).
The heroine is a gorgeous blonde played by Andrea Allan: thankfully, 1970s British genre cinema was virtually a haven for such starlets, even if only a handful ever made it to the top (while the greater majority were hardly ever heard of again)! Like VAMPYRES (1974), nudity here is bountiful (in all senses of the word) including a surprisingly steamy encounter between the disturbed sculptor/murderer (Karl Lanchbury, who also appeared in Larraz's subsequent erotic vampire flick) and his mentor/aunt(!) although the ever iconoclastic Luis Bunuel would go one better the following year in THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY by showing a young man sleeping with his own grandmother!!
Incidentally, it seemed silly to me to have the heroine here jumping straight into a romantic attachment with a complete to say nothing of wimpish stranger (who, conveniently, turns out to be the killer!) after having not just witnessed a cold-blooded murder but also having had her unreliable boyfriend disappear on her for good! The expected 'red herring' character is here supplied courtesy of Peter Forbes-Robertson's eccentric birdwatcher neighbor.
Incidentally, the photographic models milieu is extremely typical of such European thriller fare and the film's bland treatment of it certainly adds nothing new to the formula. Also quite inevitably, the film went through various title changes: the original one was SCREAM AND DIE! but, apart from the one I watched it under which is listed above, it was further hyperbolically dubbed PSYCHO SEX FIEND.
The heroine is a gorgeous blonde played by Andrea Allan: thankfully, 1970s British genre cinema was virtually a haven for such starlets, even if only a handful ever made it to the top (while the greater majority were hardly ever heard of again)! Like VAMPYRES (1974), nudity here is bountiful (in all senses of the word) including a surprisingly steamy encounter between the disturbed sculptor/murderer (Karl Lanchbury, who also appeared in Larraz's subsequent erotic vampire flick) and his mentor/aunt(!) although the ever iconoclastic Luis Bunuel would go one better the following year in THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY by showing a young man sleeping with his own grandmother!!
Incidentally, it seemed silly to me to have the heroine here jumping straight into a romantic attachment with a complete to say nothing of wimpish stranger (who, conveniently, turns out to be the killer!) after having not just witnessed a cold-blooded murder but also having had her unreliable boyfriend disappear on her for good! The expected 'red herring' character is here supplied courtesy of Peter Forbes-Robertson's eccentric birdwatcher neighbor.
Incidentally, the photographic models milieu is extremely typical of such European thriller fare and the film's bland treatment of it certainly adds nothing new to the formula. Also quite inevitably, the film went through various title changes: the original one was SCREAM AND DIE! but, apart from the one I watched it under which is listed above, it was further hyperbolically dubbed PSYCHO SEX FIEND.