24 HOURS OF TERROR

Directed by Gastone Grandi. 1964. Italy.

The film begins with the arrival of a man named Hughes in France. We are told nothing about him. At this stage of the game, all we really know is the company he keeps, as we witness his driver shoot an armed thug to death in the airport bathroom. As Hughes and his driver head to a hotel meeting room, they discuss the plan. They aim to intercept a man named Tronche, a gun for hire who is on his way to do a job for a drug dealer named Jean. Hughes subdues Tronche and knocks him unconscious. He changes into Tronche's clothes and leaves the hotel, meeting another thug waiting in a car at the side of the road. Hughes gets in, and the two men drive off.

Is Hughes a member of a rival drug gang? Is he an undercover cop? The answer is left until the very end. That is massively unfortunate. That narrative piece is by far the strongest and most interesting story on offer here. The minute-by-minute narrative is largely uninspired, carried out in fits and starts with only a few eye-catching set pieces to break the monotony.

The bulk of the story revolves around the gang, a handful of lifeless individuals holed up in a French villa. They’re waiting for ‘the merchandise’ to arrive. There's Jean, the kingpin with a penchant for playing the piano, and Maria, his young sexpot of a girlfriend. Danielle, a pretty blonde, low-level thug, is the real center of Jean's attention. Pierre is the cook and lookout man. Lafitte is a macho prick who dislikes Hughes from their first meeting. Much of the film deals with their personal squabbles, whether it's Jean's desperate attempts to woo an uninterested Danielle or Lafitte's attempts to undermine (and at one point, even trying to murder) Hughes. The film does, however, take a sharp right turn at around the half-hour mark when the other member of this gang, Theo, ends up dead with a knife in his back.

But as quickly and unexpectedly as that happens, the murder-mystery angle is dropped in favor of more interpersonal squabbles and bickering. For a few moments after the discovery of the body, the film flirts with the Amateur Detective narrative, with Hughes anxious to find out who the killer really is. The film returns to this narrative several times over the next hour, but only briefly, only long enough to remind us – and the characters – that someone in their gang was murdered just a few hours ago. As the film winds on, it becomes more and more of a bog-standard crime melodrama. The only scene with any measurable tension is a three-minute set piece of Hughes crossing a rickety suspension bridge, but that has more to do with the hand-held photography than with any purposeful construction on the part of the director.

In the final half-hour, the body count ramps up quickly but so does the campiness. The killer shows back up, knocking off Lafitte (the discovery of the body prefigures a very similar scene in Argento's THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE). In the film’s most unintentionally comedic moment, the killer terrorizes Jean, Danielle and Maria by turning off the lights and shining a flashlight at them. Jean fires pot shots around the room, aiming everywhere except for the flashlight, as the killer unloads canned, maniacal laughs on the soundtrack. This quick and sudden shift into horror territory is as unsuccessful as its attempts at crime drama. It's ridiculous and hamfisted, but after an hour of largely stoic melodrama, it's a nice change of pace.

Then the final reveal comes around, and the film once again morphs into something more serious. The motive for the killings is one of revenge, the murders carried out to avenge the painful overdose of a loved one. The finale’s construction, with not one but two reveals after the murderer is unmasked, shows how good this film could have been. Had this committed to being a thriller rather than a lukewarm crime drama, it all would have worked better. The ending is a fast, furious bit of fisticuffs and gunshots with a delectable bit of irony tossed in for good measure. But are five good minutes worth sitting through 81 minutes of forgettable mediocrity to get to? Not really.