The Red Queen Kills Seven Times

Kitty and Evelyn are sisters. After their grandfather's death the family castle comes to them. A story comes with it: once every hundred years the Red Queen returns and kills seven people. In the family it was told to them as children and nobody took it seriously. Then people around Kitty begin to die. The killer is a woman in a red cloak who laughs before she kills. Kitty is hiding something and the narrative keeps it until the end. Emilio P. Miraglia directs. Barbara Bouchet, Ugo Pagliai and Marina Malfatti take the leads, and Sybil Danning is in the cast. The film is one of the examples of giallo; Italian crime horror produced a great deal of this shape in the early seventies. The usual elements are here: the gloved killer, the subjective camera, a family secret and sections set in the fashion world. Miraglia had made a similar production before this one and the two are spoken of together. Its weakest side is the solution; who the killer is gets explained by a piece of information arrived at by chance. Its strength is atmosphere: the castle, the fog and the red costume entered the visual memory of the genre. Bruno Nicolai's music is what is most often recalled about it. Who it is for: viewers who like giallo and seventies Italian genre cinema. Who it is not for: the plot is inconsistent, the characters shallow, and the pace uneven.