Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key

Death and desire are inextricable in this clever reworking of Poe’s short story, which trades the first-person POV of a man ruing the growing blight upon his soul for a slasher thriller in which the identity of the perpetrator initially remains a mystery.

Martino's Giallo doesn't adhere strictly to the traditional rules of the subgenre and it's all the better for it. Edwige Fenech and Anita Strindberg are both fantastic in this beautifully voyeuristic adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat.

...a wonderfully lurid, pervy and overheated melodrama...

Overdone but enjoyable.

Visually sumptuous, narratively thrilling and musically memorable, Martino's take on Poe is an absolutely delightful melodramatic hybrid giallo.

Giallo is often about keeping characters (and audiences) off balance. Your Vice... does so with effortless glee, embracing the frazzled and warped headspace of people who believe they are immune to fate's spiteful sense of comeuppance.

It's classic giallo: a mysterious killer stalking beautiful women, interspersed with scenes of sex, sadism, voyeurism, and utterly gratuitous nudity.

Although the dialogue is often clumsy and the story quite silly in places, this is a film that will delight genre fans.

A story soaked in corruption, violence and twisted sexuality.

Indulgent title it may have, but everything else about this fine, tight, tense movie is the very opposite of indulgence.