Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Leoni Haney Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

qmtv Excellent Cinematography & Music. Story is lacking, maybe in the English Translation.This is the same director and cinematographer who made Footprints on the Moon, excellent movie.This movie also has great cinematography and the directing/editing is a fine job. Music is good as well. The acting is good. But the story is lacking. Maybe the story is lost in the English translation. Best suspense is when the killer was going after the kid. It's a good thing the kid didn't get killed, that would have been bad, and sick! Maybe in the original Italian, the story holds up better. And maybe some graphic scenes were cut out for the English release. If so, then this is a great film, and great production. But as it stands I can only give it a C, or B -, 6 stars. Worth checking out for the camera work.

kapelusznik18 ****SPOILERS**** Great atmospherics keeps the movie "The Fifth Cord" from putting its audience to sleep with the plot at times making no sense at all as well as those who ended up being murdered in it. It all started at a New Years Eve party where all of the victims as well as their killer were attending. It's downtrodden and drunk reporter Andrea Bild,Franco Nero, or Mister Bill as he's called all throughout the film who ends up doing the work that the local police are supposed to do in finding the killer. The deranged killer who mails audio recordings to the police about his crimes as well as amputate the fingers of his victims in some kind of sick rituals on his part.There's also Mister Bill's estranged wife Helena, Silvia Monti, who by her standing by her man-Mister Bill-despite all the abuse she takes from him makes her a target of the masked, with what looked like a sock pulled over his head, killer. It's Mister Bill who soon discovers that only the people who attended that New Years Eve Party were the ones who ended up being murdered with their fingers chopped off by their killer. What'e even more amazing is that the killer for some strange reason choose Tuesday as the day of the week to murder them! It takes a while for Mister Bill to realize who the killer is but by then it's almost too late for him. That's when the masked killer ends up crashing into his wife's house and threatening to not only murder her but her 6 years old son Tony as well! ****SPOILERS***** With her estranged husband Mister Bill coming to her and Tony's rescue the killer who seemed to have, like a trapezes artist, excellent acrobatic abilities turned out to be a hard nut to crack or catch. That's until he lost his footing and fell down some 50 feet from the deserted factory loft landing flat on his back. It's then that we discover who the hell he or for a moment, with what looked like his face heavily and cosmetically made up, she is. And as we and Mister Bill also learn is that all his killings were for sheer revenge. But to throw the police and Mister Bill off his tracks he murdered four other persons who had nothing at all to do with his hang-up, the person who set the crazy guy off, only just to try to cover his tracks.

SJSondergaard "I am going to commit murder," whispers our killer, as the camera flits around the jaded revellers at a New Year shindig. "I can imagine the thrill and pleasure I will experience as I stalk my victim..." Shortly after, John Lubbock (Maurizio Bonuglia) survives an attack in an underpass on his way home, and journalist Andrea Bild (Franco Nero), a fellow attendee, decides to investigate. Then a second party goer - invalid Doctor's wife Sophia Bini (Rossella Falk) - is attacked and killed in her home, and Andrea's elderly editor is found dead in a local park, both bodies accompanied by the killer's calling card (a black glove with first one then subsequent fingers cut off). Suddenly, the outspoken, hard-drinking journalist finds himself rising swiftly up the list of suspects.What raises The Fifth Cord above the average giallo is striking cinematography and a couple of genuinely suspense-filled murders. The sequence involving the Doctor's wife is the most characteristic of the genre. Taking place in a huge and intimidating bedroom it also evokes the Gothic feel of old Hollywood and the memory of a certain Mrs de Winter. Bazzoni expertly handles the build-up of tension, getting the unfortunate Mrs Bini out of bed and crawling along the floor in a rising panic as first her wheelchair then telephone (her lifeline) vanish into the shadows. There's an almost supernatural element at play here. When the familiar gloved hands suddenly appear either side of the screen to slowly descend from behind and wrap themselves around her throat, they seem almost disembodied.In contrast, the rest of the film is a study in modernity. Everything is concrete and glass, clean lines and polished surfaces. Every shot is carefully and deliberately lensed and filled with geometric shapes and patterns. Edges and shadows converge to corral Nero as the finger points increasingly in his direction. A scene in which he meets with the investigating officer in a subterranean parking lot is particularly well done, where the frosted windows behind the actors are reflected in the roof of the car in front and join with the widescreen framing to form a cage. The ending comprises tough-guy fisticuffs and a pulse-quickening chase sequence through the cadaverous wreck of an abandoned factory where Nero finally unmasks the black-coated killer, having already deduced the real motive, which twists the opening voice-over in a new and ambiguous light.This is a solid, visually impressive giallo, if at times a little less engaging than it should be. The characters, other than Andrea, aren't effectively introduced or given enough screen time and are too often simply referred to by name, so it's difficult to remember who's who and why we should care. Consequently the narrative sometimes lacks clarity, getting itself into a bit of a muddle during the mid-section, and having spent most of the film presuming events have unfolded over a matter of days only to discover the killings have been occurring for roughly a five month period is a little jarring. There's nothing to suggest the passage of time, though the static environment does correspond with Bazzoni's austere vision.A cold and relatively bleak film, The Fifth Cord makes the most of its angular urban settings to say something about the fractured nature of modern city life, from Nero's world-weary alcoholic loner to the estranged Doctor and his wife to hardworking single parent Helene (Silvia Monti). A world filled with acquaintances as opposed to friends, where people choose the warm bodies of strangers (filmed here with restraint rather than a gratuitous eye for sleaze) over the ones they may have at home. Nero, though at times out-and-out brutish, brings gravitas (and a suitably chiseled visage) to his genre-standard character, and Monti, in a limited role, manages to be strong and insightful and can keep her head in a crisis, helping to counterbalance the popular view of women in gialli as merely window dressing or cannon fodder. The English dubbing is of a high standard, with Nero providing his own voice. Overall it's more of a straightforward crime caper than a horror yarn, but worth checking out for the arresting visuals alone.

Michael Middling giallo which is done no favours by losing much in the English translation and leaving us with no-one to identify with except a womanising alcoholic journalist (a profession worthy of no higher status than underneath a rock in the pecking order of Italian thrillers) amidst its phantasmagoria of inadequately characterised characters.The film is nevertheless interesting as an example of the way the inspirational dynamic of the genre-director relationship can be periodically inversed by genuine mastery, as enigmatic writer/director Bazzoni acknowledges his debt to Dario Argento and his epochal 'Bird Of Crystal Plumage' with, firstly; in the film's native Italian; one of those silly 'animal' titles ("The Black Days Of The Ram") that proliferated in this vein until the mid 70s, and under which the mystery is far more meaningful and less frustratingly convoluted.Secondly, the proliferation throughout the film of occasionally effective set-pieces and attention-grabbing individual shots realised through Bazzoni's technically adroit grip on the manipulation of geometric and geographical spaces to alternate agoraphobia and claustrophobia where, disconcertingly, the opposites of each should ordinarily occur. Some characters have extraordinarily spacious open-plan apartments in which crucial bits of suspense take place; and elsewhere tunnels and other similarly threatening confined spaces are presented anamorphically and are not re-'squeezed' for printing, with the result that suspense and tension is heightened.The usual incidental decorative pleasures apply; ie that of the production designer having ordered the entire contents of one of those late 60's continental Vogue/Cosmo-esquire coffee table-crushing fashion journals to be arbitrarily strewn across the sets.The original limited British cinema release (1972), under both this title and the vulgarised "Evil Fingers", seems to be the equivalent of the Salvation video release, although censored by 2(!) seconds. Some sources suggest that the original Italian print clocks in at 100 minutes, but it's hard to imagine a prospective 8 minutes of further footage having any profound overall impact.