Death Smiles on a Murderer

The promising premise develops into a bit of a muddle, but what could have been merely baffling schlock was elevated by some nice camerawork, a dreamy, interesting score, and Kinski's fascinating face. It has an effective, semi-Gothic feel, some eerie moments, and a solid helping of sleaze and gore. Overall, the plotting is largely incomprehensible, but the film has enough style and charm to make it quite involving, and pretty watchable.

There's some decent parts to this but its buried beneath a terrible nonsensical script, piss poor editing and runtime padding nudity/sex scenes. The gore is decent but not spectacular but there's not that much of it, the score is good, and the cinematography was nice.

This early movie from infamous Italian director Joe D'Amato, in fact the only one to direct under his real name Aristide Massaccesi, is best described as a gothic giallo with a heavy dose of eroticism. Of which the gothic horror parts work best, thanks to an uncanny atmosphere created through strong editing and a great score. The plot is a total mess.