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Been a few weeks since my last "Chilling Classic," so today I went with 1973's Medusa, a rather tepid murder mystery set in modern-day Greece which stars George Hamilton (who also produced the film) as a spoiled mining empire heir who's worried about being cut out of his father's will. Seems he's in deep to the mob for $173,000, which local enforcer Cameron Mitchell is keen to get out of him, leaving Hamilton scrambling to find out who has the copy of the old man's new will. Meanwhile, his sister (Luciana Paluzzi) gets engaged to a swarthy Greek businessman (Theodore Rubanis), and Hamilton not only shows up for the party late -- and drunk -- but he's also dressed up like a late-model Elvis in a white suit with butterflies on the pants and jacket. That's actually one of many impressions he whips out over the course of the film. Later on he does Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, W.C. Fields and some people that he did so poorly I couldn't identify them.
The first person to bite the dust is the father's lawyer's police escort, whose car gets pushed off a cliff and somehow doesn't explode. (Either that hadn't become a cliché yet or they simply didn't have the money to do it.) He's soon joined by the lawyer and several others, which gets the attention of the local police inspector (Takis Kavouras), who goes to see Mitchell thinking -- not unreasonably -- that he might be involved. The thing is, after the first two murders all the others are set up by Hamilton and carried out by a mysterious masked figure whose identity is sure to disappoint you. Or maybe it just disappointed me because I guessed who it was long before the big reveal. All I know is it seemed to take forever to get to that reveal because this film has more padding in it than you can shake a light meter at, which they apparently chose not to do since so many scenes are grossly underlit.
Things I wasn't expecting to see in this film: two bare asses, male, when Kavouras calls on Mitchell at a bathhouse; Mitchell soaped up from head to toe in the same scene; and Mitchell slapping Hamilton's ass (thankfully not in the same scene). I also appreciated the cameo by the dancers from the "Cheese Shop" sketch. They definitely livened things up a bit, but after the first half hour or so director Gordon Hessler seemed to give up on giving the film any sense of the local color. Maybe he was already looking forward to his next project, 1974's The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. That would certainly explain why he was so indifferent about this middling George Hamilton vehicle.
nervous
energetic
anxious
