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Overrated

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Excellent but underrated film

Don't listen to the negative reviews

The 1971 Italian/Spanish coproduction "Cold Eyes of Fear" is hardly a giallo (at least in the sense that I understand the term) and not even a horror movie; rather, it is a fairly tense hostage thriller with the bare minimum of nudity and bloodshed. In it, an ex-con named Arthur Welt (well named, as he sure is good at inflicting welts on others!), along with a Cockney goon named Quill, breaks into judge Fernando Rey's swank London mansion, holding the judge's solicitor nephew and his luscious Italian whore of the evening prisoners whilst they carry on their agenda. What ensues is an increasingly suspenseful and violent battle of wits and brawn between the four, leading to some surprises for the viewer as Welt's intentions become clear. In the role of Welt, Frank Wolff, who many may recall as the horny paterfamilias from the previous year's "Lickerish Quartet," is excellent, by turns urbane and a frothing madman. Julian Mateos as Quill is convincingly menacing, Giovanni Ralli as the feisty hooker is very fine, Gianni Garko as the young nephew is spot on, and Fernando Rey...well, he literally phones his role in. The picture has been terribly dubbed and features numerous scenes of unconvincing fisticuffs. The initial 20 minutes are pretty slow going, and will likely leave most viewers wondering just where this darn thing is going. Fortunately, the film does pick up nicely once the brutish Quill makes his initial appearance, and a discordant jazz score by the maestro, Ennio Morricone, helps us get over some of the duller patches. Director Enzo G. Castellari's work is pretty flashy here, and the film has been shot and edited for a fair amount of disorientation...including a few trippy fantasy sequences. In all, a reasonably gripping entertainment, and nicely presented on this Image DVD.

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".

Spanish, Italian co-production, set in London and already we are wondering if all will be well. We certainly get some strange accents and if this is giallo influenced, it is not drenched in the genre. What we don't get is lots of gore and nudity. On the plus side there is some Morricone soundtrack, great night shots of late 60's London and some unusually serious discussion of bribery and corruption in high places. Actually these suggestions of a totally corrupt judiciary might be references to Italy rather than England but hey.. There are some nice twists and if the piece is a little wordy it never stops being interesting as the characters change their stance and help to keep us on our toes. Meanwhile Fernando Rey spends the film sitting at his desk waiting for a bomb to go off, which it does and it doesn't!

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.