Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key
Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key is a 1972 film from Italy, directed by Sergio Martino, running 96 minutes. reelscum files it under giallo.
- Year
- 1972 · 1970s films
- Country
- Italy
- Runtime
- 96 min
- Director
- Sergio Martino
- Updated
- 29 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- cult (37/100)
- Also known as
- Excite Me · Eye of the Black Cat · Gently Before She Dies
Defined in the glossary: Giallo
Best title in the genre. Poe adaptation with Edwige Fenech and a black cat.
Best title in the genre, and a film that earns it. A drunken failed writer terrorises his wife in a decaying villa, a black cat named Satan prowls, and Edwige Fenech arrives to complicate an already poisonous household. Sergio Martino loosely adapts Poe's The Black Cat into a study of a rotten marriage.
It is nastier and more claustrophobic than the globe-trotting gialli, trading glamour for domestic cruelty, and it is better for it. Fenech and Anita Strindberg are both excellent.
A chamber-piece giallo, and one of Martino's sharpest.
Trailer
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Where to watch
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Written about
- The giallo, 1963 to 1976
A line of yellow paperbacks, a killer in black gloves, and Mario Bava building the American slasher a decade before Hollywood cashed the cheque.
Filed alongside
Hatchet for the Honeymoon
A bridal-couture killer who narrates his own psychosis, and the best ghost gag Bava ever staged.
The Black Belly of the Tarantula
The killer paralyses you first so you feel it. A first-rank giallo nobody name-checks.
The Red Queen Kills Seven Times
A family curse, a killer in a red cloak, and a legend that kills every hundred years.
The College Girl Murders
The point where the black-and-white krimi tips over into full-colour giallo delirium.
Pieces
Spanish, incoherent, and gleefully stupid. 'Bastard! Bastard!'
The Case of the Scorpion's Tail
Martino at his most efficient. Nobody wastes a frame.
The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh
The Martino/Fenech formula, arriving fully formed. Cut and retitled Blade of the Ripper in the US.
Short Night of Glass Dolls
Narrated by a paralysed man presumed dead. Unusual and very good.
StageFright
A killer in a giant owl mask, a locked theatre, and Soavi announcing himself.
The House with Laughing Windows
A rural giallo with no gloss and a deep, patient dread. Often voted the best one going.
All the Colors of the Dark
Satanic paranoia in Swinging London. Edwige Fenech is excellent.
The Psychic
Fulci does a clockwork giallo. A woman's vision of a murder turns out to be her own future.