everything you have heard about this movie is true.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Blistering performances.

I was looking for another Sylva Koscina movie to watch last night and stumbled across a Giallo she did that I had never seen. So Sweet, So Dead turned out to be a rather predictable, but highly enjoyable film. The set-up is straight out of the Giallo playbook – a masked, gloved killer is butchering beautiful women. Each of the women is involved in an extramarital affair. The killer leaves pictures of the women with their lovers at the scene of each murder. The police, led by Inspector Capuana (Farley Granger), are baffled. I wrote that So Sweet, So dead was predictable. That's to say there's not a lot of originality to the movie. The masked killer, the beautiful women, and the knife to the throat are standard fare in most any Giallo. Until the very end, the movie plays it reasonably straight without a lot of the plot twists and turns found in a lot of other Gialli. That all changes, however, in the last 10 minutes. The plot twist at the end is incredibly dramatic and left me with an uneasy, cold feeling. It completely caught me off guard. The twist was really a nice turn of events. I also want to give director Roberto Bianchi Montero (unknown to me) extra credit for creating atmosphere. For a movie like So Sweet, So Dead to be effective, you have to have atmosphere. Montero expertly ramps up the tension just prior to each kill. Nicely done.The cast is especially strong. Granger is very good. I've always found him underrated in any movie of his I've seen. Koscina is as delightful as ever. I only wish she had played a more prominent role in more of the movie. There are a lot of gorgeous women rounding out the cast, including a brief, but welcome performance from genre fav Susan Scott. I say "brief" because she shows up, has sex, and promptly gets killed. Not a lot of screen time in this one for her.

Following a brutal crime spree, a police detective investigating a strange killer targeting unfaithful wives and adulterous spouses finds that a potential witness may help solve the case and tries to protect her when the killer starts to torment her while continuing his spree.This was quite the fun if slightly problematic sleazy Giallo. One of the more impressive acts here is the fact that there's a decent investigation wrapped around the strong sleazy thrills. With the introduction of the photography storyline in the crimes and using that as the main basis for catching the culprit, this one offers up the kind of traditional Giallo trope needed to drive the storyline forward with some extra notes that lead rather nicely based on the confines of the action here especially once it starts to signify the killers' chosen targets as that is a nice difference from most others who go for random victims at the start before the spree is found out. This addition makes for some fun as it builds that up into the remaining segments that play off this section of the storyline. Those stalking scenes are really fun, from the first encounter chasing the victim onto the beach from her apartment, appearing in the bedroom of the victim and chasing her into the bathroom for the final murder or to the tense sequence of the wife getting ambushed inside the backyard and ending up having the whole affair witnessed secretly by the daughter which is a rather enjoyable highlight offering. A dispatch on a train speeding through the night is incredibly fun as well with the darkened compartment hiding the killer rather well, and a later scene featuring the killer striking a victim in a bathtub only to then have the husband arrive and alter his exit strategy makes for a thoroughly enjoyable and tense sequence. As these scenarios allow for a constant stream of nudity and softcore fondling in showcasing their carnal exploits before the nude bodies are shown to be hacked to pieces, it gives this a rather fine sleazy air which all make for a rather fun genre effort. There are a few problems with this one, though, in that the film mainly employs a rather distressing hypocritical air that doesn't come off that appealing. Going off on the idea that the victims are being punished for straying from their husbands, a double-standard emerges when the male characters are also shown to be doing the same thing yet they never run into any kind of retribution because of it. Depicting them as heartless and needing to pay for their actions yet allowing the men to be okay with it gives it quite an old-fashioned air and tone that openly condemns their actions even though all the extramarital affairs are given loving, leering close-ups to see their full-on nudity. It's not a very welcoming tone for a horror effort and takes a lot of air out of the film as well as the fact that there's quite a long time in between many of these deaths as the investigation takes over to the point of ignoring a lot of other aspects here that don't make for an enjoyable time here. These hold it back even though it does have some worthwhile points.Rated X: Continuous Full Nudity, strong sex scenes, Graphic Violence and Language.

"So Sweet So Dead" aka "The Slasher Is...the Sex Maniac" tells the story of a Italian detective Inspector Capuana who tries to catch an elusive serial killer entirely clad in black a la "Blood and Black Lace".The killer's victims are sexy and nude or semi-nude married women who cheat on their husbands.Our killer is a misogynistic slasher who enjoys stabbing his victims to death with a switchblade knife and throwing photos on their bloodied bodies.Along with Renato Polselli's "Delirium" "So Sweet So Dead" is one of the sleaziest giallos of early 70's.It features plenty of female nudity and some perverse murder scenes including one particularly nasty slashing on the beach.There is also truly bizarre necrophiliac character of pathologist's assistant Gastone.The cast includes Farley Grangers and some sexy Eurobabes including Sylvia Koscina,Femi Benussi,Annabella Incotrera,Nieves Navarro and Krista Nell.7 razor wielding maniacs out of 10.Feminists will love this film.

This is yet another giallo helmed by a little-known director; the suggestive but actually deceptive original title, which translates to REVELATIONS OF A SEX MANIAC TO THE CHIEF OF THE MOBILE SQUAD, would lead one to believe that this is very low-brow stuff indeed – however, the end result (propelled by a pounding Giorgio Gaslini score) is not bad at all. Besides, there is a good cast on hand: the obligatory American 'star' is once again Farley Granger (looking remarkably more mature than in SOMETHING IS CREEPING IN THE DARK [1971]), but then we have what can best be described as cameos by "Euro-Cult" regular Silvano Tranquilli and three of its luscious starlets – Sylva Koscina (playing Granger's wife), Femi Benussi and Susan Scott; all the females are made to shed their clothes, with the latter two even involved in surprisingly explicit sex scenes! Incidenatlly, along with STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER (1975; also with Benussi), this was the most erotically-oriented genre effort I have watched so far; in fact, the movie under review was subsequently re-assembled and distributed as outright hard-core material under the moniker PENETRATIONS (but Granger understandably – and successfully – sued the producers over it)! The plot sees the traditional black-gloved killer targeting a small town's apparently unending population of cheating wives (leaving as calling-card photos of them caught in flagrante, albeit with their respective partners' face clinically erased); in this respect, it also emerges as one of the more moralistic giallo entries (at least, this time around one is spared the usual pursuit of the proceeds of either an inheritance or an insurance policy!). By the way, the film even foregoes the last-minute explanation of the killer's motives which concludes (unsatisfactorily) many a giallo – though, in view of just this unexpected striving for satirical relevance (which proves rather vapid nevertheless, given the sheerly exploitative elements by which it is surrounded), here was perhaps a case where one would have liked to know what made this particular person tick (a gratuitously deranged morgue attendant had been made to fit the bill all along, but the real culprit was not too far off the mark anyway)!!