Torso

Sergio Martino spends an hour on a fairly standard campus-stalker giallo, all scarves and red herrings, and then delivers a final act that justifies the whole thing. A group of women hole up in a remote villa, one wakes to find the killer already inside, and the sequence that follows plays out almost silently as she tries not to make a sound.

It is a masterclass in staging suspense with almost no dialogue, and it points straight at the American slasher that arrived a few years later. Everything before it is decoration; that last stretch is the real film.

Sleazier than it needs to be for fifty minutes, then gripping.