It gets really, really warm in Rome during the month of August, and a lot of Romans head for the hillside towns like Tivoli to cool down a bit, so it's no surprise that those who elect to stay suffer the consequences. A spate of suicides is plaguing the city, as we see a few Romans graphically taking themselves out at the start of the film, including one old guy who puts a plastic bag over his head and jumps in the Tiber. That's no cry for help!
All this business is taking its toll on coroner Mimsy Farmer, who, while doing an autopsy on the old fella, has to also put up with the advances of a weirdo assistant: "Brains leave me cold, but I've got something warm for ya!" To make matters worse Mimsy starts hallucinating that the corpses around her are getting up and bumping uglies with each other. Mimsy needs a break, but of course Ray Lovelock comes along, does an impression of a corpse, and scares the crap out of her. This leads to a romance for some reason.
The plot for this one is rather tangled, but let's try and simplify it. Mimsy lives below an apartment owned by her good-looking, rich father and meets his new fiancé, a nice red-headed girl who is found dead on Ostia beach the next day of a gunshot wound. It's apparently suicide, but then Mimsy is doing a research paper on staged suicide and thinks foul play was involved. So does the dead girl's brother, a race car driver who has since become a priest (yep), so if the girl didn't kill herself, who did, and why?
There are many suspects to choose from, including the dog-owning landlord who is always looking up Mimsy's skirt, the weirdo assistant who, in one of those bad-taste moments of Italian cinema is also a necrophile, Ray Lovelock and his bizarre porn-slideshow seduction techniques (that work!) and Mimsy's father, who is up to something or other. It all comes together in the end but like Armando Crispino's earlier giallo The Etruscan Kills Again your head will be buzzing trying to keep up with all that's going on.
Although the Roman locations, Morricone soundtrack and cinematography lend this one a lot of style, there's still plenty of sleaze to bring the tone down a bit. Both Mimsy and Ray get nude at various stages, as do many other actors (in corpse form, mainly), and one character seems to be holding some sort of art exhibition about dead bodies. It's also a very strange film as well, with a sub plot about the suicides being blamed on sun spots and a bizarrely detailed scene involving one of the characters being horribly crippled after falling off a roof.
