63/100
Thought I had an offbeat reaction to this giallo-slasher hybrid, but no, looks like virtually everyone agrees that it's an hour of ho-hum lurid boobs-out murder mystery followed by possibly the most prolonged and inventive Final Girl stretch of all time. This being my intro to Martino, I didn't know what to expect apart from dialogue scenes that are poorly dubbed irrespective of which language you choose (went with the Italian version), plus I'd somehow inadvertently caught wind that there's hacksaw-based grisliness (not an issue for me as the killer only hacks up non-suffering corpses). "This guy's not for me" was my dejected conclusion after three reels of porn-level acting among women who all look like runway models and men who all look like sex offenders, salted with comically gratuitous female nudity and peppered with standard giallo murders (gloved killer, fetishistic weapon, wide-eyed victim). To some extent, that's just me rejecting the genre—I'm not a psychotronic guy, can rarely get past much less embrace the slapdash aspects that aficionados forgive if not enjoy. So it never occurred to me that maybe I just hadn't gotten to the good part yet. In fact, as Jane (Suzy Kendall, who at 36 was almost geriatric by '70s thriller/horror standards and does in fact seem less disposable for it) and three barely distinguishable friends head for a secluded hilltop villa, I mentally settled in for what I assumed would be the next half hour of the killer picking them off one by one before finally being unmasked and revealed as the sole male character at whom suspicion had never been expressly directed.
That last part does in fact happen. (Bonus red-herring points for Dani talking to her uncle on the phone from Paris and "casually" remarking that the connection's so clear that he sounds as if he's in the next room. Knew that must be misdirection but it still tickled me.) But after we see Stefano at the villa's front door, a gloved hand shoving his lifeless body to the ground, cue terrified screams from everyone except Jane who's asleep upstairs...Martino unexpectedly cuts to daylight, as dirt gets shoveled into Stefano's grave. Formally, this transition precisely mirrors every previous post-murder shift back to temporary normalcy, though there's a disorienting lacuna in this case. Did the killer just split after dumping Stefano's corpse inside, opting to murder the ladies some other time? SPOILERS NOW: Nope, they're all dead. Slain between cuts. Only Jane was left alive, and that, we soon discover, is because the killer had no idea Jane was there, as she'd arrived later than and separately from the others. Her discovery of the bloody bodies downstairs, followed by the killer returning to hack said bodies into pieces (which he hadn't done with any previous victims, but never mind), kicks off a prolonged virtuoso suspense sequence as Jane attempts to hide all evidence of her presence in the villa and convince the killer that his work there is done. Martino's compositional sense hadn't impressed me much prior to this point, but he turns out to be an expert at obstructed views, showing us only what little Jane can glimpse from various hiding places. And suddenly it's one fantastic narrative wrinkle after another: Jane stuffing her things and all of her room's bedding into an armoire, then looking down at her bare feet and realizing with horror that she needs to retrieve the slippers she lost on the stairs while running in crazed fear; the killer, having left, happening to overhear some local dork insist to his pals that No there are four hot chicks staying in that villa, a gorgeous blonde showed up after the others; Jane, locked in her room after the killer's departure, methodically struggling to dislodge the key onto a newspaper she'd pushed underneath the door (classic!), as we watch the key fall well clear of the newspaper and then—loud delighted cackle from yours truly—see the killer's gloved hand pick the key up and gently place it on the newspaper as Jane slowly, carefully pulls it back to her side of the door. That flourish alone compensates for much of the preceding tedium.
ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: No ambiguity re: the English title (apart from torsos not particularly figuring into the story; I guess that's what you're left with after you remove the head and all the limbs with a hacksaw), but this is one of many Italian films with a far more distinctive title in its native language: I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale, or The Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence. Indeed they do. Indeed they do.