In Milan, a middle-aged man by the name of Berzaghi (Raf Vallone, 1969’s The Italian Job) is not only widowed, but the sole caregiver for his mentally handicapped daughter, Donatella (Gillian Bray, The Bod Squad). Although she is 25 years old, her mind is stuck at 3; she can’t even put on a brassiere without her father’s help. Innocent flirting on her part is misread as sexual invitation from strangers, so Berzaghi must lock her up in their apartment when he goes to work.

One day, however, he returns to an empty home. The doors and windows remain locked; there’s no sign of forced entry. He fears the worst, as he should: that she has been abducted from his well-intentioned prison to one that has only the worst intentions in mind.

Enter the sinus-infected police captain (Frank Wolff, Once Upon a Time in the West) and his younger, shaggy-haired partner (Gabriele Tinti, Black Emanuelle), who have a feeling Donatella may have been kidnapped into a prostitution ring, so they tour the area’s buy-before-you-try bordellos.

The mystery of Duccio Tessari’s Death Occurred Last Night is not whether Donatella will be found among the whores, but who will find her and/or her captors first: the police or Berzaghi? The increasingly desperate father doesn’t think the authorities are acting fast enough, so he takes matters into his own vengeful hands.

Tessari (A Pistol for Ringo) directs this grim yet gripping polizia picture with a straightforward objective that makes its story timeless: suspense. So do the colorful supporting players who weave in and out of the story, not always by their own volition, including a suicidal “Negro prostitute,” a former pimp stooping to a less respectable career (that of car salesman) and a teddy bear with an ugly face. However, the show belongs to Wolff and Vallone; the former for portraying how a cop’s professional life infringes upon his personal one, and the latter for showing how an honorable man in his position gives up his own life to focus on that of his only child. —Rod Lott

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One of many Edgar Wallace adaptations Alfred Vohrer directed for the big screen, The College-Girl Murders begins with a scene straight out of Business 101: A scientist invents a new, odorless poison that’s 100-percent efficient in causing immediate death in its inhalants. As soon as he sells his find, he’s killed by the buyer.

We know not who this mysterious purchaser is, but we know what he intends to do with it: Annihilate some co-eds. One of those Dr. Mabuse-ian villains who rules over a hideout with a built-in crocodile lair, this enigmatic antagonist has more than one nut doing his bidding, including felons snuck in and out of their prison cells via garbage cans.

Most notable, however, is a whip-wielding monk clad in hooded duds that look like a Ku Klux Klan uniform accidentally got mixed with a load of reds in the wash. The robed menace runs amok in a girls’ dormitory, planting booby-trapped Bibles that spray the deadly gas upon opening. He then exits via the fireplace, which raises to reveal a secret passageway, natch.

Colorful in look and swinging in sound, The College-Girl Murders is such a blast on several levels that I’m willing to overlook the title’s unnecessary hyphen. The German film marks a solid krimi — not just among the Wallace adaptations, which number so many that they make up their own subgenre, but among the country’s thrillers of that era. It boasts a genuine whodunit plot, lovely ladies ripe for the offing, gadgetry galore and one way-out ending in which the authorities scamper out of frame as soon as they notice a card reading “ENDE” floating in the turtle aquarium behind them. —Rod Lott

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Bruno Nicolai’s theme to The Case of the Bloody Iris is a jaunty, joyful number I never tired of hearing, even when it is not appropriate to the flavor of the scene, which is to say each and every one of its appearances, opening credits included. I hardly minded.

The film itself hits another of my pleasure centers: high-rise settings. In this case, it’s an apartment building home to a couple of recent tenant murders committed by a man in black — and that includes his hat and panty-hosed head, making him look like the DC Comics character The Question, if dipped in India ink. One poor woman was offed in the elevator; the next, tied up and drowned in her own bathtub.

On the plus side: Hey, ladies, a vacancy! And in moves Jennifer (Edwige Fenech, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key), a lovely young model trying to escape her abusive ex. Making a play for her is the building’s architect (George Hilton, I Am Sartana, Trade Your Guns for a Coffin), a real gentleman, but a real wuss when it comes to the sight of blood. However, when Jennifer’s daffy roommate (Paola Quattrini) becomes the killer’s next victim, the architect is offered up as one of many likely suspects.

For once, the mystery’s solution was not startlingly obvious to me, but maybe I was too busy soaking up the film’s groovy, dreamy visuals to notice. Alternately known by the utterly incredible title of What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood Doing on Jennifer’s Body?, this giallo from Giuliano Carnimeo (Exterminators of the Year 3000) is eye-popping in its Pop Art veneer, its moments of shock and its leading lady, who has the worst luck in keeping her clothes from being torn by the greedy hands of others. —Rod Lott

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While driving through a tunnel, wealthy newlywed Virginia Ducci (Jennifer O’Neill, Scanners) experiences a terrifying vision of a woman being walled up, “Cask of Amontillado”-style, by a man with a limp. It’s hardly Virginia’s first brush with clairvoyance, having “seen” her own mother’s cliffside plunge to suicide 18 years earlier. (Never does The Psychic top that prologue sequence in shocks.)

As a surprise for her husband (Gianni Garko, Devil Fish), Virginia plans to restore a mansion he hasn’t used since bedding babe after babe in his playboy bachelor days. To her horror, she recognizes a wall there as the one from her blackout dream; sure enough, inside is the skeleton of a female believed to have been in her 20s. When it’s revealed that the mystery woman was one of Mr. Ducci’s numerous conquests, Virginia works with her shrink and authorities to prove her spouse’s innocence and find the true killer, not to mention decipher the remainder of her clue-filled hallucination.

That’s the problem with The Psychic, a mostly mainstream effort from excess specialist Lucio Fulci (The Beyond): It spells out its own denouement with alarming simplicity. If viewers pay any reasonable degree of attention, they’ll have the ending solved by the second scene — not an exaggeration. I thought surely Fulci’s story would have more to it than that. It did not.

While she is quite the knockout, O’Neill’s abilities as an actress stand in indirect proportion to her looks. Fulci’s camera asks little of her but to stand still with eyes widened and mouth agape, so he can zoom in for a close-up. Over. And over. And over. Just because his film is about a psychic and titled after a psychic doesn’t mean it should settle for predictability. —Rod Lott

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Twenty years after the death of tortured painter Legnani (Tonino Corazzari, Le strelle nel fosso), a restorer is hired to complete the artist’s mural on a church wall in a small, picturesque Italian village. Stefano (Lino Capolicchio, The Bloodstained Shadow) arrives to find a disturbing portrait of a saint whose naked, tied-down body bears seeping wounds from being daggered several times over.

Not for nothing was Legnani known around town as the “Painter of Agony,” for he liked to depict men and women at the precipice of meeting their maker. Stefano finds a tape recording of Legnani droning on, near-orgasmically, about the “purity of death,” which leaves our protagonist with an eerie feeling that he’s not being told everything surrounding this temporary gig. Of course, his inclination is spot-on.

As Stefano sets out to stick his nose into Legnani’s legacy and history, not to mention the story behind this unfinished fresco, death rears its head — suicide or murder? The path of Stefano’s unofficial investigation is paved with an elderly paraplegic woman, two hot-to-trot teachers, a rat-eating altar boy, a fridge full of live snails, untold numbers of shadows and secrets, and eventually, The House of the Laughing Windows.

At one point, Stefano’s love interest (Francesca Marciano, Seven Beauties) remarks, “The gloomy darkness is romantic. Right?” — a line which nails much of the appeal of the Gothic film by Pupi Avati (Revenge of the Dead), which takes a turn toward horror in its final moments. There’s not much to the easily solvable mystery, but it’s fun to watch it unfold — or flop out, as the case may be. As with many Euro shockers of the period, atmosphere mitigates shortcomings. —Rod Lott

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