In this off-beat giallo Silvano Tranquili plays a workaholic husband who returns home from yet another long trip away from his wife to find a dead body lying in his front garden, and his wife sitting at a dining table with a gun in front of her. Curiously, he wants to know what's happened, and when his wife declares she still loves the dead guy lying in the garden, it makes for a lengthy flashback that makes up a lot of the film.
You see, Silvano is so engrossed in his work that he's been neglecting his wife Anna, even to the point when he falls asleep during one of their 'special nights', right before he heads off for another business trip. Anna feels a bit put out, and finds herself increasingly attracted to her jerk neighbour, a drug-filled hippy artist who regularly has vocal, naked arguments with his various girlfriends. As she keeps spying on him getting it on in his sparse living room, it also becomes apparent that he knows she's watching him.
Interspersed with this story unfolding is Silvano's reaction to all this, and his attempts to hide the body from various nosy neighbours, especially the caretaker who is always mooching about. For a story that involves two people sitting across from each other talking, this is all bizarrely engaging.
Back pre-dead guy, we see Anna and her neighbour Massimo hit it off big style, getting it on and doing that romantic thing people do in seventies films where they chase after each other on a beach while giggling. This is all nice until Massimo starts displaying a really dark side which is aggravated by booze and drugs, which has him have two of his stinking hippy girlfriends strip Anna while he thinks of a novel use for an empty coke bottle...
Indeed, by this point I was thinking Anna wasn't very good in her choice of men as she now has to get away from Massimo while hiding all this nonsense from her husband. This leads to some very tense scenes as Massimo begins to psychologically torture Anna, branding her a cat in heat while his stinking, jobless, mooching, drug addicted, clap-ridden, flea bitten, rag-wearing, flag-burning, toothless, stained, sullied, snot-caked, jaundiced, shoeless, uppity, idealistic, opportunistic, hypocritical hippy friends howl like cats.
Folks who reckon gialli plots exclusively belong to the 'people getting stabbed up by a mystery killer' will be tragically let down by this and may even attempt suicide, but those who can't be bothered creating sub-genres for every single minute deviation will realise that the mystery element to this one is rather good, if you can take that crazy ending. I've been after this one for ages, so who knows how I missed it as it's been sitting on Youtube since 2016!
Those who want blood and gore might want to skip this one, however.
