The Salon Christiana has mock-Baroque rooms with red dress-maker mannequins dotted like vast blood-tipped pins. There are the bright lips: scarlet slashed across white skin. Manicured hands pull up nylon tights, deliciously, unlatch and link suspenders. Christina Cuomo retains tight catwalk discipline with blades from flashy brown eyes, a word from wasp-stung lips. She's the dream dominatrix: tragic, unfuckable. Just one Italian ideal among many others: the fey blonde with the dark secret; the peasant brunette with the uncanny instinct. Nicole runs cocaine, Peggy had an abortion. Isabella was murdered first: she had a crimson diary, with everything in it. Everyone is dying for the diary. Literally: skin slashed, a face slowly scolded on a hot iron oven, wrists slit, a body dumped in a bath, or dragged along the ground, suffocated with a pillow, strangled with wire. Usually slowly, with silence between screams, lurid red light and pitch black shadows. Everyone is guilty or dead. Motives multiply, a livid nightmare of scarlet, crimson, sable, jet, silk.
Sei Donne per l'Assassino (Mario Bava, 1964)
