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I often thought while watching The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972) that it all could have been done better by Sergio Martino. You can’t help but think of him because it stars two of the people, Edwige Fenech and George Hilton, with whom he’d make several gialli — the genre under which The Case of the Bloody Iris unequivocally falls — and because of stylistic and narrative touches the more artful Martino had an easier time with: psychedelic visuals over-dependent on the wonders of a kaleidoscope lens; the presence of a creepy cult from whom our heroine can’t seem to get away. 

Still, director Giuliano Carnimeo, who worked at a relentless pace between 1968 and 1976, keeps everything sturdy, helping the convoluted mystery screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi cooks up stay engaging and the set pieces memorable — particularly the one set in a pitch-black boiler room where the only source of light beams from a flashlight that could only be held by the killer.

The Case of the Bloody Iris wants to know who’s responsible for the growing number of murders of beautiful young women all living in a vast apartment building whose elevator becomes so synonymous with terrible things that it seems to be constantly making trips to Hell even when it’s going up. Much of the film focuses on Jennifer (Fenech), a model who moves with her garrulous friend Marilyn (Paola Quattrini) into one of the building’s flats. It was only a few days ago that the last victim (Carla Brait) in this serial killer’s quest was drowned in the unit’s bathtub; the only Black character in the movie, she’s one example of giallo’s frequently icky relationship with race. (Black women characters, in the rare cases they’re included in the narrative at all, are usually killed in a particularly sexualized fashion; in this movie’s case, that’s again true, and preceded by a scene where the woman challenges a man in the predominantly white audience of the strip club where she works to make her his “slave” as her on-stage shtick.) 

If it weren’t bad enough worrying about whether you’re due to be your building’s next murder victim, Jennifer also has to worry about the return of her estranged husband, who led a sex cult from which she has been trying to keep her distance. (Not to invoke Martino again, but a plot involving Fenech being anxious about a cult that desperately wants her to be part of it is much better done in All the Colors of the Dark, which came out around the same time as Iris.) Iris is so busily plotted, though, that the cult stuff will eventually be essentially forgotten about. It’s mostly just backstory-as-decór, a way to flatter Fenech’s sex-symbol cred with some trippy visuals, than anything that important to Jennifer’s future.

Though she isn’t written with extraordinary depth, Jennifer is still among the more multi-dimensional women Fenech played in her giallo films. (The roles she got tended to oscillate between helpless-victim and vamp types.) Jennifer is certainly terrified in Iris, but that isn’t all she is. Many of the film’s best moments come from her gumption, which leads her to places like a suspect’s ostensibly vacant apartment. (She breaks into it alone, looking for answers.) She knows she can only really rely on herself to get to the bottom of what’s going on. It would be unwise to trust anybody in either her new building or her general vicinity; likewise for the police, whose ineptitude is always a promise. (Giving the film some decent laugh lines is what they’re good for.) When Jennifer gets answers, the killer’s identity surprises, but his motivations don’t; one can depend on giallo to explicitly villainize misogyny only after it’s luxuriated somewhat (or a lot) in the salacious thrills it had provoked beforehand.