Two
rich sisters named Kitty and Eveline live in a mansion where a spooky painting of
a woman in a red cloak foretells their ominous fate. Decades later,
friends of the now-grown Kitty (played by Barbara Bouchet) are picked off one
by one by a killer dressed as the woman in the painting. It’s only a matter of time before she becomes
the killer’s next target. Even though
the police are hard at work on the case, Kitty is withholding an incriminating
secret that could bust the investigation wide open.
The central murder mystery is ho-hum, and the stalking scenes suffer from a few repetitive kills. (The only memorable death involves someone being impaled on a gate.) In fact, the film’s subplots are a lot more interesting than the murder investigation itself. The legend of the woman in red, along with the revelation of Barbara’s big secret (not to mention her involvement with a junkie blackmailer) are sure to keep you engaged when the rest of the movie is spinning its wheels.
The
Red Queen Kills Seven Times is an uneven, sometimes frustrating giallo, but it’s
buoyed by a great performance by Bouchet. She’s given plenty of scenes that allow her to
descend into wild-eyed theatrics and she looks positively stunning during her
freak-outs. While most of the film is
patchy, the final reel in which Bouchet is locked in a slowly flooding room teeming
with rats is stellar. (She also gets a
handful of sultry nude scenes too.)
Sybil Danning also shows up briefly, but you’ll wish her part was
bigger.
AKA: Horror House.
AKA: Blood Feast. AKA:
Feast of Flesh. AKA: The Corpse Which Didn’t Want to Die. AKA:
The Lady in Red Kills Seven Times.
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