La settima donna

As successful as Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left" was, it was such an unpleasant and notorious film that it didn't spawn too many imitators in American. Italy, however, was a whole different story, There "Last House" and its home-grown, pseudo-sequel "Late Night Trains" spawned an entire subgenre (albeit a pretty small one) known as the "terror film". These films usually fell into two categories. Some are flat-out sexploitation films like "Terror Express" and "Escape from a Woman's Prison" that are pretty hard to take seriously, where others, like "Late Night Trains", are pretty disturbing but are also usually much more stylized and less graphic than the infamous American film (the one exception to all this was Ruggiero Deodato's "House by the Edge of the Park" which might even be MORE harrowing than the Craven film).

This movie falls more into the latter category. It is a more-or-less serious film about three fugitive bank robbers who rape, murder, and generally terrorize a nun and a gaggle of Catholic schoolgirls at an isolated cottage by the beach. The violence is pretty nasty, but not especially graphic. There are three rapes, including a fatal one involving a walking stick, but they are highly stylized and/or take place mostly off camera. There is a general lack of character development,however, so that even the strongest actors like Florinda Bolkan and Ray Lovelock are not as effective as they could have been (having seen "Flavia the Heretic" and "Let Sleeping Corpses Lie" I would have expected more from a face-off between nun-heroine Bolkan and bank robber/villain Lovelock). The girls are all nubile but not particularly young or innocent looking (Sherry Buchanon, for instance, had been playing abused schoolgirls since "What Have They Done to Your Daughters?" in 1974). This is somewhat appropriate, however, since the movie seems unsure at times whether it wants to pity them or sexually exploit them.

The ending is interesting although I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Neither the best nor the worst of its kind.