Cold Eyes of Fear (1971)

The Worst Film Ever

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Dull and truly disappointing early 70's Italian film that can never seem to decide whether it wants to be a typical giallo or an ordinary crime thriller. The opening is very promising, showing a girl assaulted by a man with a knife whose face we do not see, but that quickly turns out to be a totally unrelated theater performance and that REALLY upset me! The actual story of "Cold Eyes of Fear" revolves on the pampered nephew of an eminent judge who is, together with a random prostitute he picked up earlier, held hostage by two criminals in his uncle's giant villa. One of the crooks is out for vengeance against the corrupt judge and the other merely hopes to find money in the house. What follows is a totally uninteresting and overly talkative showdown between the two parties without not even the slightest bit of action or excitement. There's some very stylish and creative giallo-camera-work to admire, but the sub genre's most appealing characteristics (nudity, graphic violence, absurd plot-twists…) are regretfully neglected. Everybody else around here seems to love the jazzy music but I personally found it very annoying and it totally doesn't fit the tone of the film. It's definitely one of Ennio Morricone's worst scores ever. During the pretentious yet hilarious opening sequences, London is portrayed like a swinging city, in the trend of Las Vegas, with colorful billboards, casinos and wild nightclubs. What the hell was that all about? Enzo G. Castellari's directing is rather uninspired and he's no competition for other contemporary Italian filmmakers like Dario Argento, Mario Bava or Sergio Martino. He did return in the 80's with one of my favorite "Jaws" rip-offs, namely "The Last Shark".

"Cold Eyes of Fear" by Enzo G.Castellari is an Italian crime drama that has some giallo elements.A psychotic man takes a guy named Patrick(and his paid escort)hostage in his uncle's home.The guy doesn't really want Patrick and the girl-he's after Patrick's uncle,who is a corrupt judge.Eventually,Patrick gets a message to his uncle to call the cops.And when the cop arrives,we find that he's in on this plan as well."Cold Eyes of Fear" is pretty good.There is only a little bit of violence and sleaze,but the plot offers enough twists and turns to keep fans of Italian cult cinema entertained.The swing-jazz score by Ennio Morricone is brilliant,unfortunately "Cold Eyes of Fear" is relentlessly talky and dull in places.However if you are a fan of Italian giallos you can give it a look.6 out of 10.

An Eton-graduated lawyer, Peter Flower, meets an Italian prostitute, Anna, in a London nightclub, and goes to his uncle's house with her. But soon the house's butler, Hawking, is found dead, and a stranger named Quill shows himself with gun. And furthermore, the arrival of Arthur Welt sharpens the unstableness of the strange triangle of two men and one woman... I think this Italian-Spanish co-produced film, which is sometimes called cult one because of its eccentric visualisation of one character's confusion of fancy with reality, is not bad at all. It has no extraordinariness of the characters, but the each character he-or-her-self is the believable who wants to be concerned only with what he or she can assimilate to. And the story is not full of highly cinematic surprises but has something realistic and familiar, and it lacks the manifest combination of love and separateness but has of (in)security and class consciousness, and of learning and sexual warfare. Still one can point out the film has some over-stylised Italian cinema-graphical techniques and somehow stereotyped female character, Anna. Regarding the latter, one can think of various possibilities of the characteristic. For instance, it can be said Anna should not be a prostitute. If she is the lover or, in better setting, one of the lovers of Peter, then her influence upon him and/or his upon her can be much more complex and profound, and so forth. But the ongoing story of the film has cinematically advance hints, and even offhanded meeting of Anna and Peter, who are first and last strangers each other, has something latently important and therefore their otherness has its own meaning. The director/co-writer E.G.Castellari could do more than what really did, but what he did was, I think, cinematically sufficient.

Pretty good little thriller, with many tense situations, an interesting plot, and gimmicky, stylish direction (lots of zooms!) by Enzo Castellari. Probably the main reason that this film isn't so well-received is that it wasn't directed by a "specialist" of the genre like Dario Argento, but if you compare it objectively with, say, the following year's "Four Flies On Grey Velvet", it's far less boring! (**1/2)