The Evil Eye, No One Believes Her

I have to say, the final 30 seconds of this film is classic!  Maybe the best last 30 seconds ever put on film! We can thank Mario Bava for that. Is it a horrific ending or a hilarious ending.  I laughed, though I do have a twisted sense of humor. We have an Italian Giallo offering today filmed in Rome. A sultry dame, and she is uber-sultry, is in great peril and no one believes her accounts of what she has seen. Today we look at Mario Bava's 1963 quirky thriller, "The Evil Eye."

Sultry dame Nora (Leticia Roman) arrives in Rome to visit an elderly family friend. The flight over is filled with intrigue, but we won't discuss that here. The elderly family friend? She dies of heart failure sending Nora running in horror looking for a doctor, Dr. Marcello Bissa (John Saxon). On the way to the hospital, a storm rages, her purse is stolen by a mugger, she falls unconscious, and when she wakes, she sees some guy stab a beautiful woman in the back...then Nora passes out again. When she wakes, her doctor tells her that like most beautiful women, she is a liar, subject to drama, and probably drunk. Marcello shows up and kind of believes her, but he is in love with her, and she with him. The two will make goo-goo eyes at one another until a gratuitous beach scene where Nora is in a bikini, Marcello in a swimsuit, they kiss, roll around in the surf, and swap spit for quite a while. 

Back to the murder mystery. Nora, with Marcello's help tries to prove she saw a murder. A beautiful woman, Laura (Valentina Cortese) befriends her and invites Nora to stay at her home during her stay in Rome. Nora finds out the murder she saw is a carbon copy of a murder of a babe 10 years ago...and that killer killed many girls...and has never been caught. More investigation reveals that Nora will be the next victim. Marcello tries to help her only believing half her story. Someone is following Nora, and anyone with knowledge of the killings 10 years ago are themselves killed.

Is Marcello the killer?  Is the murder of young beautiful women a foretelling of the EU's hatred for beauty and bikini-babes frolicking in the surf? Will Nora's avid reading of mystery novels help her catch the fiend who wants to kill her? For a sultry dame in great peril from a knife wielding killer story, see "The Evil Eye," and see the magnum opus of the very sultry Leticia Roman.

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