Part of Critical-Film's 2009 September Screams

Torso is one of my guilty pleasures. It's certainly not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, yet for some reason it keeps me captivated from beginning to end. The story is simple: A series of murders among young college students causes a group of friends to retreat to an isolated villa, where they are (obviously) stalked by the killer.

It's very simple, and speaking realistically there's not really any plot to speak of. The plot progresses from murder to murder with little to connect the events in terms of linear storytelling. What appeals to me is director Sergio Martino's desperation to keep the audience guessing as to the identity of the killer. At every possible turn, we are presented with another suspect. Every clue seems to point to someone else, and while you most likely won't figure out the killer's identity until it is revealed, it is less a result of skillful disguise, and more a result of sheer abundance of suspects. It does keep things interesting, though.

The fun of Torso however, is not in attempting to figure out who the murderer is. The fun is in the surprisingly well-constructed third act. The third act is primarily a cat and mouse chase between our heroine with a sprained ankle, Suzy Kendall (her eyebrows were seemingly borrowed hair-for-hair by David Bowie for the film Labyrinth), and the murderer, having murdered nearly everyone in the house. It's a long, drawn out and suspenseful sequence, and is certainly the films strongest point.

The film's other strongest point... an ample amount of naked ladies. Nearly every woman who appears in this film in any sort of relevant role, bares her upper half in the movie. It's typical of the Italian thriller from this era, and Martino doesn't disappoint with an abundance of attractive women.

Martino has often been compared to Dario Argento, but I think this comparison is unwarranted. Thematically they are very similar, however that can be dismissed as simply two directors working in the same limited genre. Giallo films require certain elements, and comparing two directors simply because they work in the same genre isn't fair. Martino rarely attempts any sort of stylistic flourishes that would dominate an Argento film. He makes use of one or two unique angles, but nothing that should draw immediate attention to anyone familiar with the works of Dario Argento.

Torso is an average film, with an incredible third act. As with many similarly themed gialli, the revelation of the killer is not particularly strong, nor particularly believable. While I do still enjoy the film I can certainly say that even with the well-crafted third act, the numerous naked ladies, David Bowie's eyebrows, and what seems to be David Copperfield's identical twin, Torso is still distinctly average, and relatively forgettable amongst the company of other gialli.