AllMovie

Veteran Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Bennati tried his hand at the early-'70s glut of giallo thrillers with this bloody and erotic variation on the Ten Little Indians plot line used to best effect in the subgenre by Mario Bava in the classic Antefatto. Bennati raised the quotient of sex and violence with this tale of a wealthy man named Patrick Davenant (Chris Avram) who invited nine guests to an abandoned theater where a whole family was slaughtered in an unsolved mass murder. The guests were picked off one by one by a killer wearing a mask which beared a suspicious resemblance to Cameron Mitchell, star of the prototypical giallo Sei Donne per l'Assassino. The usual tensions and backstabbing (both literal and figurative) ensued, until the madman was revealed. The film became notorious among Eurosleaze buffs for one jaw-dropping sequence in which a female victim was stabbed between the legs several times before having her hand nailed to a wooden post, and the obligatory nudity and softcore lesbian scenes. There was also a strange subplot involving an occult curse, and a familiar cast including Paola Senatore, Lucretia Love, Gaetano Russo, Renato Rossini, and a young Janet Agren, who later made her name in even more gruesome shockers by director Lucio Fulci.