Saturday, October 25, 2014

Movie review - "Paranoia" (1970) aka "A Quiet Place to Kill" **1/2 (warning: spoilers)

Another Carroll Baker European thriller involving murder and sex. She's a racing car driver (!) who is injured in an accident, and goes to stay at the home of her ex husband, Jean Sorel (who was in an earlier Baker thriller, The Sweet Body of Deborah). Sorel has remarried, to Anna Proclemer, who suggests to Baker they team up and kill Sorel.

That's a good idea for a thriller and this is pretty good, at least by the admittedly low standards of the genre. It has what Orgasmo lacked, a strong third act, with the arrival of Marina Coffa, as Proclemer's daughter. Everyone is sleeping with everyone else, there is plenty of story and some decent acting from Baker, Sorel (who spends most of the film in swimmers and whose physique is exploited almost as much as Baker's), Proclemer and Coffa - the last named I hadn't seen before but she felt familiar. Coffa and Baker are particularly beautiful.

There are elements of earlier Baker thrillers: she dances in a night club, takes a nude shower, lolls about in bed without any clothes on; there's even a reprise of the song "Just Tell Me" which was heard incessantly during Orgasmo. But it's clearly one of the better ones.

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