The Killer Reserved Nine Seats (1974) Giallo, from the outside-in (Blu-Ray Review)

One of my favourite novels is Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. It’s a dark thriller where a group of ten guests are invited to a mysterious island, and then picked off one by one, as they realise the killer must be among them. When I heard that The Killer Reserved Nine Seats was based on the Christie classic, I jumped at the chance to review it. Made in 1974, it’s an Italian film dubbed into English. The version I saw had bits which skipped from one language to the other. It has got the feel of a film which might have been on late at night on Channel 5 in the late 90s or the early 2000s watched by a teenager who sneaked downstairs hoping to catch a glimpse of boob.

It’s dated and feels it, opening with shaky cam footage of cars driving about. People start arriving. Instead of an island, they’ve been invited to a creepy theatre, which looks more like Dracula’s castle. It’s pitch black and late at night, of course, and suitably sinister music starts playing in case you’re not already clued in. The group includes a guy wearing a blue suit and medallion, who looks like he’s auditioning to be a Roger Moore-era Bond villain, and two women who are romantically involved. There’s also a man who resembles a young Jimmy Hill – a doctor who plays the role of amateur detective and sceptic – but he thinks he’s in a different genre of film to the one he’s actually in.

There are plenty of suspicious characters, hostile looks, and some rapey comments and actions. Our leading man, Patrick, has a grey Elvis quiff and mutton chops. He owns the theatre, and the gang have come here as a sort of after-party, although they all seem sober, don’t appear to like each other, and aren’t in a fun mood. Patrick is wearing a fur coat to show that he’s rich and sports a bum chin. Many of the men have similar cleft chins – were these more popular in the 70s? If you wanted to appear on screen, was it bum chins all the way?

There’s some mucking about on stage and some sort of summoning. We discover that many of the group have reasons for getting murder happy. Patrick’s wife is having an affair, for example, and we discover that Mr Fur Coat knows about it. It’s said that all the guests live off Patrick’s money, but it’s not entirely clear how. This being a horror flick, of course, they’ve all caught the idiot ball, and so split up and wander about, despite knowing that a killer is in their midst. Early on, Pat is almost killed by a wooden beam falling from above, cut down by a sinister gloved hand which reminded me of the 1980s classic Clue. The doors are locked, the keys are missing, the phone isn’t working – so far, so predictable, but these clichés are there for a reason.

Pretty much all the ladies get naked, usually for no apparent reason, and manage to get in lots of breathy gasping and screaming. Whenever couples sneak off to have sex (only the women disrobe) invariably someone is shown watching and sneering. Clothing is ripped off at the drop of a knife, and the women weren’t wearing much to begin with. Quiet dialogue rapidly alternates to loud shrieking, which will have you dialling the volume up and down or just watching the whole thing with subtitles, although you’ll miss out on the 70s background music if you do. It’s obvious titillation, with the emphasis heavily on the first syllable, as yet another gratuitous nudity scene comes along. At one point one of the women takes drugs and then dances starkers in front of a mirror, as music blares and the camera lingers.

There are attempts at turning this into a proper mystery with a few ‘clues’ – one of the women drops a black glove as worn by the killer, and you can narrow things down a bit by paying attention to who is absent, but that’s not really the point of this film, and anyone expecting a real puzzle to solve is going to be disappointed.

The strength of the film is the atmosphere, lighting and setting, which makes the best use of the theatre location with sinister mannequins, deserted auditoriums, jump scares from falling suits of armour and the like. A sequence featuring the killer stalking a victim with the use of a buzzing sound emanating from speaker trumpet things is effective.

The killer wears a rubber mask which makes them look like a Thunderbird puppet, complete with a theatrical black cape and ginger curly hair, like a cross between The Hood, the Phantom of the Opera and Mick Hucknall. The combined effect, is, as you would expect, equal parts unsettling and hilarious. Theatrical masks are genuinely creepy, and this one also reminds you of a ventriloquist’s dummy, adding to the uncanny valley unease. The kills themselves have some variety. Victims are stabbed, strangled, crushed, and hung up by rope. One is killed on stage while reciting the poison scene from Romeo and Juliet as the others look on and applaud. Another is stripped naked, stabbed repeatedly in a place you really don’t want to be stabbed in, then appears in a tableau of death alongside another victim, having been nailed up by her hands, after the fakest looking hand-nailing scene you’ve ever seen.

The main problem is the supernatural element, which is especially present in the second half. It turns out one of the guests is a ghost. There’s some nonsense about an ancient family curse, and incest is mentioned. There are some spectral mutterings that one of the gang records on his tape player dictaphone thing, but the recording picks up nothing. Smashed-up doors and cut ropes mysteriously become whole again.

The solution is something of a let-down, in that it doesn’t really matter who the killer is, for the spooks and the curse is given the focus, and the plot is convoluted, involving – spoilers, I suppose – an attempted murder sparking curse madness in the intended victim which triggers most of the killings through unremembered blackouts, before then going back to the original guilty parties at the end, only for them to be bumped off themselves by the ghosts. Yeah. We have a final girl, who survives by luck and escapes. She’s shown as perhaps being the least unlikeable of the group, although it’s not clear why she is set free, or how – it just sort of happens. It’s not as satisfying as rooting for her and having her escape by her own grit would be, but then, this isn’t that sort of movie.

There’s some unintentional comedy here, with lines like ‘Oh my god, I look as white as a corpse’ muttered by someone who looks the same as she did in the opening scenes, and a ‘pull yourself together’ slap straight out of Airplane! The whole thing feels sort of like an old X-rated episode of The Avengers (the one with John Steed and Emma Peel, not the Hulk and Iron Man).

It feels like someone wrote two scripts, one a murder mystery, and the other a ghost story, and edited them both together. The result is something that doesn’t quite succeed at either but probably would have worked better as the former. None of it makes much sense at all. This is silly shlock horror with a soft porn feel to it. If you are prepared to overlook the misogyny and violence against women, and retro gothic voyeuristic slasher erotica is your thing, then have at it. If you’re going to watch, maybe invite a few friends over, get some drinks in, make up some viewing games, and have a good laugh and perhaps the odd scare at the bizarreness.

THE KILLER RESERVED NINE SEATS