Being Film #14 for Hooptober 2023
And so I come to end of my giallo journey with Sergio Martino, whose films I started digging into back in May when I went on a spree with the Italian killer flicks. The Suspicious Death of a Minor was the last of Martino’s films to really have anything to do with the genre, mixing the “unidentified killer stalking beautiful women” motif with the growing poliziotteschi genre that was taking over at the time. It’s a bit of a mixed bag because of that, not knowing what to be at any given moment of the film. Still, it looks great and has a few sequences that make it a solid film and one I’d recommend, especially if you’re a fan of Martino’s other work.
THE QUICK SUMMARY: Undercover police inspector Germi has a habit of breaking his glasses, but that’s small peanuts compared to the number of beautiful young women who keep dying around him. Partnering up with a small time street thief, Germi unravels a conspiracy involving underage female trafficking, drugs, and money laundering, but he’ll have to work hard to get the proof he needs before whoever is killing everyone off comes for him, next…
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss his regular cast of characters, especially George Hilton and Edwige Fenech. There’s no real female lead to speak of here, and my overwhelming thought regarding Claudio Cassinelli as Inspector Germi was that he was quite possibly the most inept policeman I’ve seen be the lead of a serious police drama. Maybe that’s due to a too convoluted script by giallo favorite Ernesto Gastaldi, who chalked The Suspicious Death of a Minor up to a minor film that Martino couldn’t, in his words, “give a decisive shot in arm” to.
The fault isn’t Martino, sorry. Together with cinematographer Giancarlo Ferrando who shot many of his previous films, the film looks great, and has some nice surprises, including a ridiculous car chase that mines a lot of humor during its pursuit – at one point car doors are torn off and thrown. There’s also a rollercoaster shootout and a rooftop chase that has al the earmarks of what Martino brought to his previous works. Good, good stuff, but when in service to a story that can’t focus what else can you do?
If you’ve never seen a Sergio Martino film before, don’t start here: go with The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and move slowly up from there, hitting his major works. Once you get to The Suspicious Death of a Minor you’ll enjoy it for what it is, a solid if somewhat unremarkable film.
Cinema Dual 