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Chilly blond Mimsy Farmer is an Italian medical student who has disturbing visions of the waking dead during a rash of grotesque suicides. She works in a morgue where every living man in her orbit hits on her and one coworker even tries to rape her ("You can't blame a guy for trying. Nothing turns on a man more than an icy woman," comforts an oh-so understanding boyfriend). Barry Primus is an angry priest with a dark past and anger-management issues (he screams, "I've killed many others and I'll kill you too," while beating a man's skull into the pavement). The apparent cause of the suicide hit parade is extreme sunspot activity (each death is punctuated with fiery images of solar flares), but when victims close to Farmer start dropping from high-rise windows, the picture twists into a murder mystery with a gallery of sleazy and shady suspects. Director Armando Crispino fills in the edges with unending images of death, shocking violence, and gratuitous nudity, creating an intermittently stylish but often bluntly exploitative horror mystery. Shorn of 15 minutes when it debuted in American theaters in the mid-1970s, the sex and violence has been completely restored for video. One short scene is in Italian with English subtitles, due to missing soundtrack materials, while the rest is dubbed in English. Ennio Morricone provides a suitably strange mix of atonal stings and lovely melodies.
--Sean Axmaker
