Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Maidexpl Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Stephen Abell This is another dire film that could have been much better as the story has a good premise.Dr Herbert Lyutak is a doctor of psychology and he is suffering from shell-shock after he returns from the war. While suffering from this psychological ailment he kills a woman he's given a lift too as she's rejected his sexual advances, though his mind blanks out the incident. As time passes he gets glimpses of the murder and informs the police of his visions. They, in turn, start to suspect that something isn't quite right with the good doctor. As we progress through the movie we get an insight into his newly formed sexual deviations and his wife's' ability to conform to them because of her love for him. There are a few twists and turns though it's the last twist which really makes this a "Throw- away" movie.Unfortunately, it's the unbelievably appalling acting, especially from the lead actors, and the abysmally bad writing along with awful direction and cutting that really kills this film.Mickey Hargitay (Dr Herbert Lyutak) acting skills come straight out of the redwood forests. There are actually times you think a makeup artist will come on with a sander as a puppeteer appears to move him into his next position. His wife, Marcia Lyutak, played by Rita Calderoni, is so over-the-top that it passes from amusing into dreadful.The pace is all over the place and there are some scenes that appear to have been thrown in just to titillate, especially the light S&M and lesbian scene as there's no sense or reason for them being in that section of the film. The lesbian scene is also one of the longest segments in the film. This is a shame as the opening sequence, the pickup and murder of the girls is done really well - nicely shot and thought out. I thought I was going to be watching a respectable movie... boy was I wrong.I wouldn't recommend this to anyone, not even fans of Italian Gallo as there are much better examples of it out there to watch.

Camera Obscura DELIRIUM (Renato Polselli - Italy 1972).If it's sleazy '70s exploitation you're looking for, packed with sexual violence and some truly twisted proceedings, look no further. I've watched some weird stuff in my lifetime, but this one truly hits the mark. Clearly, Polselli is a first-class hack and this is an incredibly shoddy piece of work, but somehow it was compelling enough (or just plain weird) to keep watching. I'm not sure though what that says about the film's qualities. At least it says something... Hungarian muscle man Mickey Hargitay is criminal psychologist Dr. Herbert Lyutak who picks up a sweet young thing at a local bar, and gets the uncontrollable urge to strangle her at the sight of the girls legs. This is one wacky doctor that turns out to be a homicidal maniac, or is he? The local police doesn't suspect him, that's for sure, and treat him with the utmost respect. As a criminal psychologist, they even consult him to catch the culprit. The investigating police officers don't seem very trustworthy of a murder investigation. The one in charge is a skinny, somewhat suspicious looking chap, wearing a garish red blouse through the entire film (this is 1972, ya know). His assistant is a seriously groovy dude, impeccably coiffured with a perfectly trimmed beard and wearing some very cool Italian suits. No, he does not look tacky at all, the latest fashions is all he wears. But this was the English countryside, I digress. The primary source of income for the local female population seems to walk the streets, mostly on deserted country roads or the village square, where they don't seem to do a lot of business. It's only a small village, after all. But it's very convenient for deranged sex killers with a taste for young women. Problem is, our two police officers haven't got a clue how to crack the case. Even after the fifth killing, the two detectives come little further than exclaiming this is yet another identical case. They come up with the luminous idea of using some woman as bait (she was actually not just someone, but I can't remember) who is also killed, but these two don't hesitate to use this tactic again and employ some more female bait. To complicate matters, Dr. Lyutak's beautiful wife (Rita Calderoni) is tormented by visions of medieval torture and lesbian orgies, a perfect excuse to throw in some more naked female flesh and gratuitous torture scenes. Rather distracting is the film's English setting, unconvincingly done as usual in Italian films, since the film excels in very picturesque outdoor scenes in the Italian countryside and even a shot from a roof that immediately betrays the location as Rome(!). To make up for its completely nonsensical "plotline", Polselli throws in three killers(!) and since there are no likable characters in the film anyway, the only way to watch this is for an almost continuous wacky stream of hallucinations involving torture SM-style, chain whipping, bondage, masturbation and lost of killings of course. It's a glorious mess, but Polselli keeps the action going, so it's never really dull. Anchor Bay presents this as an "astonishing 1972 oddity by the notorious Renato Polselli (under the pseudonym Ralph Brown)." Well, this oddity is presented in both the Italian and U.S versions, which are radically different. The American version opens with Vietnam footage explaining how Dr. Lyutak got his trauma, an explanation completely lacking in the Italian version. Regarding the American version, Anchor Bay neatly explains the original Vietnam footage was lost and some of this footage was taken and inserted in this version from a Danish VHS-copy and is presented with subtitles. To my surprise, it's actually a Dutch copy they used here, the subtitles were unmistakeably Dutch. Furthermore, in the American version, Hungarian born Mickey Hargitay's own voice is used (he only spoke English, no Italian), but his accent is even thicker than Arnold Schwarzenegger in his early days (which Hargitay humorously admits in an accompanying interview), so it's very hard to understand what he's saying. Incidentally, Schwarzenegger would even play Mickey Hargitay in the 1980 film THE JAYNE MANSFIELD STORY! In any case, the Italian version is taken from a much better print, so I'd advise anyone to start with that one. Camera Obscura --- 7/10

Red-Barracuda This is a somewhat crazed and depraved giallo. The Anchor Bay DVD contains both the international and the American versions of the film. Both are very different. The U.S. version has a Vietnam War framing device similar to that used in Jacob's Ladder almost 20 years later. It also contains two more murders and is slightly more coherent than the international version, despite being about 20 minutes shorter. But both versions of Delirium are, well, delirious.The film concerns a homicidal doctor who is a serial murderer of young women. Just when he starts to be questioned by police for his involvement in the killings another maniac starts a murdering spree that confuses the issue.The whodunit aspect of this movie is a little obvious. So the mystery element is less important. Instead, the film works best as a demented series of shock scenes, all strung together by a loose plot. The editing is not very good but it adds a bit to the haphazard nature of the film as we are jerked around from scene to scene. The music score by Gianfranco Reverberi is very effective in sustaining the delirious atmosphere.This is a very sexually explicit giallo. There is a multitude of female full-frontal nudity on display. The murder scenes are often pretty misogynistic, not something uncommon to the genre, but a little more extreme here than normal. There are also some well shot S&M dream sequences that feature writhing naked women! The plot is a little over-convoluted. Once again, this is a common giallo feature but, again, more-so here than normal. It can be quite difficult to follow the narrative as the story is all over the place. This fact is made even more apparent when watching both versions of the movie, you will see that scenes are ordered quite differently.Overall, this giallo movie is weak on narrative but compensates for that with, well, excess. The effect is a film that is true to it's title. It really is delirious.

Maciste_Brother Major Spoilers!!!DELIRIUM is more like a trashy, super sleazy twisted soap opera than a giallo. The overwrought direction/script/acting/sleaze sends DELIRIUM in the irremediably silly and worthless category. If you thought BASIC INSTINCT was misogynistic in its view of women and lesbians, you have seen nothing yet compared to what DELIRIUM has to offer. Every woman is a "helpless" killer or a helpless victim. They're all lesbian, unfaithful, and insane. And more importantly, naked. This might sound shocking to some and some scenes do shock a little but it's because the film/scenes are more annoying than anything else. DELIRIUM is very typical 1970s Italian provincial style of film-making. The overacting and over everything is something more akin to the style of acting seen in cheap Italian soaps than movies, which is why DELIRIUM ends up looking like a twisted version of DAYS OF OUR LIVES.The story and direction are remarkably convoluted and confusing, and deliberately so. This in order to hide the obvious potboiler storyline: An important and rich doctor is married to a beautiful young woman. The problem is, the doctor is IMPOTENT and the wife is still a VIRGIN. The two have never consumed their marriage (gasp!). The frustration of being an impotent man married to a virginal wife is shown as the main reason for the doctor's dementia and why he goes around killing young women, as seen during the opening sequence when he brutally kills a young girl in river. After this murder, the doctor becomes a suspect and is interrogated by the police. The wife, who knows her husband is the killer, is madly in love with him, and will stand by him no matter what. As the police are interrogating him, another woman is strangled at a phone booth. Because of this one murder (and subsequent murders), the doctor is not seen as the main suspect anymore. Who is behind these new murders? Who doesn't want the doctor to be found guilty by the police? Who wants to protect him? Yes, you've guessed it. The wife, of course. The story is so melodramatic and stupid that the film actually tries to make the sick doctor look like the hero by the end of the movie by portraying every woman (the wife, her friend and the maid) as total nut cases and whores. The doctor's massive serial killing streak (at the beginning of the film, we are told that there had already been 17 murders) is suddenly trumped by the protective wife's recent serial killings. Needless to say, the end result makes it look like that it's okay if a man kills tons of whorish women because he's impotent, but it's wrong for whorish, insane women who kill for love. But the really funny thing about all of this is that even though the wife is shown to be totally devoted to her husband, to the point of wanting to kill in order to save him, she is having an affair with the maid AND her best friend. This begs the question: how much in love is she really with her husband if she's having sex with two women? I guess the virginal wife needed to get her kicks somewhere.So, the husband kills because he's impotent (what's with Italian movies and impotence anyway?). And the virginal but whorishly bisexual wife kills because she loves & wants to save her impotent, serial killer husband. Does that make any sense to anyone?!?! The storyline is so divorced from logic that it's pointless trying to make any sense of it. Throughout the movie, we see the wife crying because their marriage is less than perfect. Boo-hoo! Who freaking cares. I don't know what kind of message the movie tries to send (if any) but it seems to say that having a fulfilled marriage is the ultimate raison d'etre in life. Yeah, sure!And to think, all of this mayhem could have been prevented if viagra had existed back then.Anyway, to make things even worse, not only is the direction convoluted but, technically speaking, it's really terrible too. Some scenes are totally disjointed. In one scene, the husband is fully clothed. In the next scene, he's bare-chested and seemingly naked. The sloppy editing and direction reminds me of the style of direction seen in old Bollywood movies, where people would be seen entering an elevator with one type of clothes and leave the elevator with a totally different wardrobe. Those looking for sleaze might get a kick out of DELIRIUM but the trashy romance style of film-making might hinder any fun to be had from the shameless exhibitionism on display from time to time. Watching DELIRIUM is a more frustrating experience than an entertaining one, even in the "it's so bad it's good" way. I know, you can't take a film like this too seriously but that doesn't change the fact that it's almost totally worthless. The only good thing about this crappy, twisted soap-opera-disguised-as-a-giallo is the beautiful Rita Calderoni. She's one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen. She even comes out looking pretty good from this stinking pile of crap, which is hard to believe!