An Ideal Place to Kill Blu-ray Review

Ingrid and Dick are an attractive young couple on holiday in Italy. They make their way selling illegal Scandinavian porno magazines and nude photographs of Ingrid. Not ones to show responsibility, they usually party their way through their funds within a matter of hours. When they get caught by the police violating decency laws, they are given twenty-four hours to leave the country. With no intention of cutting their vacation short, they simply drive to another city where they come across some thieving motorcyclists. Once again strapped for cash, they find themselves in new trouble as they are mistaken for a pair of fugitive bank robbers.

They speed away until they run out of gas where they happen upon an isolated house. The owner, Barbara, is a high-strung middle-aged woman who is at first confrontational but quickly becomes engaging. She tells them her husband is away and breaks out the booze for a wild night. The next morning, Dick and Ingrid are in for a surprise when they find themselves locked in separate bedrooms. Dick finds a large wad of cash in his pocket and slips out a window, arriving downstairs just in time to catch Barbara calling the police. She has cleaned up the house, removing all signs of a party and scratched her chest looking to frame him for assault. Dick confronts her and she hangs up denying everything, but when he and Ingrid search the house they discover she is keeping a deadly secret.

An Ideal Place to Kill (aka Oasis of Fear, aka Dirty Pictures) is a 1970s Italian thriller of sorts, infusing elements of the popular giallo style of storytelling with the counter-culture ethos of the era. Director Umberto Lenzi (Cannibal Ferox) sets up his story innocuously enough with the introduction of an attractive, peace-loving couple with a lust for life on vacation. Their idea of harmless fun frequently steps outside the boundaries of the law, but these truly are innocents abroad. Dick and Ingrid are naïve pacifists who get caught up in a situation that quickly spirals out of control forcing them to step outside their comfort zone.

Irene Papas (Don’t Torture a Duckling) stars as the calculating Barbara, a woman of many secrets who is a skilled manipulator. She fills the character with a quiet intensity that builds when her authority is challenged. Her co-stars, Raymond Lovelock (Let Sleeping Corpses Lie) and the lovely Ornella Muti (Flash Gordon) as Dick and Ingrid, share great onscreen chemistry, but Papas gives a performance that outshines their best efforts. The young lovers make great protagonists, but Barbara is far more interesting to watch.

Lenzi says he intended this film to be his take on Easy Rider, but producers got in the way and muddled his message. An Ideal Place to Kill is not one of his stronger efforts, but it remains entertaining and contains a dark sense of humor that carries the picture. Not everything works, but Lenzi succeeds more often than not thanks in no small part to the beautiful cinematography by Alfio Contini (Zabriskie Point), whose lighting design and camera work really shine. Editor Eugenio Alabiso (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) keeps things moving and generates some suspenseful moments as our young heroes discover they are being outsmarted. The film is not much of a traditional giallo, which may leave some viewers disappointed, but the material is dark enough to still warrant a recommendation.