The Killer Reserved Nine Seats (1974)

Dir: Giuseppe Bennati

Incomprehensible giallo which tries to blend as many subgenres as possible in order to achieve an optimum level of confusion for the viewer. It starts out as a kind of drawing room mystery. Ten rich assholes who hate each other congregrate in a theatre that's been abandoned for a hundred years after a series of unsolved murders. They're picked off one by one by a black-gloved killer in what appears to be a Harpo Marx mask (!) but there's also a gothic element in play here; hidden doors in the wall, family curses, candlelit corridors and torrid melodrama (even a little incest!). To cap things off, they start hearing voices that can't be recorded on tape and seeing a strange man who materialises (and disappears as quickly) in random places to spout nonsense. This all leads to a bizarre, almost Fulci-esque conclusion in a hidden labyrinth beneath the theatre. The sets are great, there's one particularly shocking death scene and it's all peppered with copious nudity but Bennati's offbeat direction is too scattershot to pull it all together. Ultimately, the slipshod way in which the film tosses aside even its own internal logic in favour of twisting the meagre plot further towards obscurity wrecks what could've been a far better movie. File under "obscure and interesting curio" instead. **