BroadcastChic Excellent, a Must See

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Nigel P London has rarely looked more magnificently seedy than in the openings shots of this José Luis Madrid directed film. Rainy, grainy and simmering with promises of blatant sleazy sex.Paul Naschy plays Pedro. Having played a variety of monsters and horror characters, Naschy had become known as 'the Spanish Lon Chaney'. As Pedro, he is the crippled victim of a circus accident, who spends his time limping around seedy London pubs, picking up fights and horrendous cockney prostitutes.It isn't long before he is suspected of carrying out gory, Jack-the-Ripper-style murders. His fight to prove his innocence to Scotland Yard's finest is what fuels the film.Sadly, it is all very drab and never attempts to rise from that. Flatly directed (apart from the rain-swept London panoramas), the interiors were shot in Barcelona and Rome.As always, the dubbing puts a wall between the characters and the audience, but even with that in mind, the performances seem very perfunctory. Naschy in particular gives us no reason to invest in Pedro and his apparent innocence. Against this, there are a few nicely gory scenes and the finale has some tension to it.

BA_Harrison 7 Murders For Scotland Yard? There might have been… to be honest, I wasn't keeping a tally of the killings; instead, I was counting down the minutes to the end of this dreadfully dull Spanish giallo starring Iberian horror icon Paul Naschy as Pedro, an ex-trapeze artist (sh'yeah right!) with a manky leg who is suspected of committing a series of grisly London murders in which the young female victims have their organs surgically removed, Jack the Ripper style.With way too much in the way of boring police procedure, repetitive killings that deliver minimal (and unconvincing) gore, and very little of the style to be found in many Italian giallos, about the only thing that the film really has to offer fans of '70s Euro horror are a few reasonably attractive women in various states of undress (although there's no actual nudity, quite the rarity for this kind of film) and some authentic location work (that said, the scene where Naschy has a knife fight with three men clearly wasn't shot in London—we don't have crickets chirping loudly in the evenings).3.5 out of 10, generously rounded up to 4 for the hilarious scene in which a victim's severed head is delivered to a police inspector, and then casually passed around the station so that everyone can take a look.

capkronos A Jack the Ripper-style killer is doing his thing in modern day London; cutting up tart streetwalkers with medical precision, removing their body parts and tauntingly sending some of those parts to the Scotland Yard detectives trying to crack the case. Top-billed Paul Naschy plays Pedro Dorian (the character name in the dubbed version I watched), a med-school dropout turned acrobat (!) turned booze swilling vagrant whose career in the circus ended after a high-wire fall left him with a bum leg. He understandably becomes chief suspect in the murders because of his medical knowledge, the fact his hooker wife is murdered and the fact he's seen fleeing a SECOND crime scene after he wakes up covered in blood and finds ANOTHER of his lovers dead in bed right next to him. Some guys just have all the luck, don't they? Not only do they find themselves in the wrong place and the wrong time on more than one occasion but they also have to star in films with scripts that rely on a ridiculous amount of sheer coincidence to keep the ball rolling. And sometimes they even write them!Pedro (who the police usually refer to as "that Spaniard") isn't the only suspect, though. There are two more. The first is Scotland Yard's Commissioner Campbell (Renzo Marignano) himself, who one little girl claims she saw at a victim's apartment prior to her murder. The second suspect is muy guapo schoolteacher Winston Avery (Andrés Resino), who has lots of money but just as many relationship problems. For starters, he's impotent. Somehow the police also know he's impotent and that's because the commissioner may be Winston's wife Sandy's (Orchidea de Santis) lover! See what I mean about that sheer coincidence thing? Winston also makes uncomfortable passes at Rosemary, one of his female students, and tries to blackmail her into breaking up with her no-good boyfriend. Rosemary turns up dead with her throat cut, but the cops never say anything about Winston being a suspect. Winston's wife is then found dead, which ties him to just as many dead women as Naschy's character, but the cops never say anything about him being a suspect. Instead, they let him go on a vacation!The film basically centers around the three men I just mentioned above. There are plenty of women on the payroll too, but none of them really have a character unless you count taking off your clothes, saying one bitchy line and then getting killed as being a character. The only one worth mentioning is a hooker named Lulu (Patricia Loran), who believes Pedro is the killer and organizes a posse of punks to attack him with switchblades. That backfires, she realizes Pedro may actually be innocent and then tries to help him implicate the Commissioner in the murders. For the finale, Pedro, the Commissioner and Winston all end up in the killer's top secret laboratory (where he stores his collection of body parts - hands, hearts, etc. - in jars) for the big reveal, which actually isn't a big reveal at all when you take into consideration one clumsy clue about the origin of the killer's weapon of choice. But hey, you do get to see Naschy leap off a staircase at one of the other suspects while screaming "You dirty keeeeeler!" I guess that's something.From a technical standpoint, the cinematography, music and locations are all blandsville. The direction isn't particularly stylish either, and the script and acting are both mediocre. Naschy fails to impress much and doesn't register much emotion as he hobbles around on London streets dragging his leg behind him, though he does get to have three separate fight scenes here. The film does a fair job of getting you to question your choice of who the killer is at a few points and adds a couple of OK twists here and there. Like another reviewer, I also saw the release from TeleVista under the title 7 MURDERS FOR SCOT LAND YARD. The print doesn't look too bad, it's dubbed (by a very snooty-sounding British cast) and it's "clothed." As was customary at this time for international productions, two different takes were done with most of the female victims for different markets, one with nudity and another with victims merely in their bras and panties. The TeleVista release uses the underwear scenes, so if you want T&A you'll have to find another cut of the film. There's a little gore, with some bright red blood and knives going into badly mocked-up torsos and backs that look like someone stabbing into pantyhose filled with lard.

MARIO GAUCI This had been shown on late-night Italian TV some years back and, later, I recall it being mentioned favorably online; hence, given its theme of an updated version of Jack The Ripper and the fact that it starred Euro-Cult icon Paul Naschy, I decided to check it out this time around. However, it turned out to be quite a mess: not so surprising when considering that the only other J.L. Madrid film I've watched was the similarly dispiriting THE HORRIBLE SEXY VAMPIRE (1970)!; as in that film, the women here are mainly on screen in order to disrobe and get butchered.The plot provides three possible suspects of the serial killings: a crippled and bitter ex-trapeze artist (Naschy) whose wife is among the victims, a handsome schoolteacher of noble birth but who's actually impotent and, surprisingly, a police commissioner who just happens to be the latter's boyhood chum and is also secretly in love with his wife (Orchidea De Santis, whom I saw in the flesh and on screen – in Luciano Salce's equally obscure but infinitely superior political satire, COUP D'ETAT [1969] – at the 61st Venice Film Festival)! The Swinging London locations are just about the only authentic element here: both the gore and the occasional action scene look extremely phony; another clear measure of the film's lack of budget is that Naschy's accident (which continues to haunt him) is hilariously depicted simply by having the actor throw himself in front of the camera and utter a couple of none-too-convincing groans!