In Italy, a serial killer leaves a calling card alongside his victim’s corpses: vintage illustrations from a book of fairy tales. What a plot! A Plot of Fear, one might say. Our intrepid investigator is the horny Lomenzo (Michele Placido, The Divine Nymph), who learns that the dead have something in common: being founders of a wildlife organization called the Fauna Club, which collects endangered species and smokes a lot of hash, although not necessarily simultaneously.
The fur flies big-time after a cop discussing the case on live TV is shot in the head. Lomenzo gains an ally and a bed partner in Jeanne (Corinne Cléry, The Story of O), a pro whore who tells him of a Fauna Club shindig she recently attended, where rich men, Phyllis Diller-esque hookers and one chimpanzee got drunk, watched a pornographic cartoon, played an X-rated party game at the dinner table, then nearly fed a call girl to a tiger. But she died of fright first, the party pooper.
Directed by Mondo Cane creator Paolo Cavara, Plot of Fear is so narratively muddled, I didn’t initially realize the above flashback was a flashback, but I also didn’t care. I was too distracted by the plentiful nudity, pig carcasses, hammer attacks, Tom Skerritt’s haircut, and racist dialogue like, “You’re worse than a black man!”
Questionable lines prove to be a theme, with a cuckolded hubby reacting to pics of his cheating wife thusly: “Look at that ass! And her tits, they’re so slutty!” Better is this exchange between Lomenzo and a fellow cop while rifling through LPs at a late-night record shop:
Lomenzo: “Do you like classical music or not?”
Fellow Cop: “No.”
Lomenzo: “Just fuck off.”
Speaking of, Lomenzo and Jeanne engage in a sex scene with so much aggressive, wide-open French kissing, one wonders if their taste buds were forever wonky afterward. —Rod Lott