Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave

Spaghetti Western veteran Antonio De Teffe (aka "Anthony Steffen") stars in this delightfully tacky supernatural giallo from Italian filmmaker Emilio P. Miraglia. De Teffe plays Alan Cunningham, a titled nobleman who has just been released from a mental institution after a breakdown brought about by the death of his beautiful red-haired wife Evelyn. Alan isn't quite right, and despite loads of helpful advice from his doctor and money-hungry cousin, can't stop picking up red-haired women and dragging them back to his castle dungeon, where his desire to punish his late wife's infidelity leads to some hallucinatory S & M murders. Eventually he meets the beautiful Gladys (Marina Malfatti) and quickly marries her, generating a good deal of anger among his greedy relatives. That's when members of his family start disappearing and the obligatory inheritance plot tightens around the deranged lord, raising the question of whether Evelyn is really dead after all. Miraglia directs with a somewhat plodding style atypical for the normally lively genre, but the film's cheese value is enhanced by a wonderfully schizophrenic score by Bruno Nicolai; an amusingly dotty production design; and enough sex, kinkiness, and violence to satisfy any giallo fan. Erika Blanc (aka Enrica Bianchi Colombatto) makes an impression as one of the strippers Alan brings to his dungeon, Alan's dead aunt (Joan C. Davis) is devoured by a cageful of hungry foxes, and the cast also includes familiar genre faces Umberto Raho and Giacomo Rossi Stuart.