Stressed-out, overworked buttoned-down forensic pathologist Simona (winningly played by the lovely Mimsy Farmer) and intense, uptight, aggressive priest Paul Lennox (a fabulously fierce and forceful performance by Barry Primus) decide to investigate one of the suicides. Reviewed by Woodyanders 8 / 10 A nicely morbid and twisted giallo murder mystery thrillerĪn unrelenting severe heatwave causes a rash of shocking suicides throughout the city of Rome. This allows for a perilous fight scene on some high scaffolding, the villain ultimately falling to their death, but next time, call the cops! The ending of the film is particularly dumb: having survived an arranged suicide by the killer, the protagonists don't go to the police, like most people would, instead opting to confront the maniac themselves. The only gore comes in the form of the real 'death' photos on display at a criminal museum. There's no explanation for Simona's funny spells, no reason is given for the frequent shots of solar flares, I have no idea what SIMONASEI means (as spelt out by Simona's paralysed father), and I'm still unsure as to why Simona is sexually repressed (although this does lead to a strange scene where her lover Edgar, played by Ray Lovelock, shows her vintage porn to get her in the mood). Sadly, the rest of the film is nowhere near as powerful or as memorable: it's a typically convoluted, frequently baffling murder mystery revolving around a missing will, and is only enlivened by frequent nudity from Farmer. It's grisly stuff, and gets seriously creepy when Simona hallucinates, imagining the corpses rising from their slabs to fornicate. He introduces lead character Simona while she is at work, surrounded by naked corpses, other pathologists busy at work cutting up the bodies. It's a grim, attention-grabbing way to open a film, but director Armando Crispino doesn't stop there.
This weird giallo starts off with several shocking suicides: a topless woman slashes her wrist a man puts a carrier bag on his head and throws himself into a river a bloke sets fire to the car he is sitting in, the vehicle exploding and a father shoots his kids and then turns the (machine) gun on himself. Pathologist Simona Sanna (Mimsy Farmer) believes that the latest victim, a woman with a gunshot to the face, didn't kill herself, and with the help of a priest, Father Paul Lenox (Barry Primus), investigates the deaths.
Reviewed by BA_Harrison 4 / 10 A dead weird giallo.Ī series of apparent suicides occur during a period of solar flares. Simona teams up with Father Lenox to solve the mystery and stay one step ahead of a mysterious killer who now begins to stalk her when she gets a little too close to the truth of the suicides. He claims she did not commit suicide but was murdered. Driven to exhaustion from the intense heat and the long hours worked, Simona struggles to complete her college thesis about natural deaths- when one "suicide" victim is brought into the morgue identified by a young Catholic priest named Paul Lenox as being his sister. Simona Sana is a young pathologist who works in a morgue in Rome, Italy which suddenly gets hit with a wave of violent suicides that are attributed to a summer heat wave.