The nightmare begins in the cinema during spaghtetti western showing.Suddenly a middle-aged man watching climatic showdown is shot dead.The doors are locked and the police is called to investigate.They have suspects among the audience,but no weapon nor motive.One of the members of cinema staff sits on the same place for the dead man.He is shot dead too.The mystery of killings comes across as a truly perplexing...Overlooked Italian giallo with solid acting and highly original plot.The posters of "Deep Red","Four Flies on Grey Velvet","The Bird with the Crystal Plumage" and "The Perfume of the Lady in Black" are a nice touch.In "Circuito Chiuso" cinema is a mysterious and subversive place,which can easily provoke violent and dangerous fantasies.8 out of 10.
8 Reviews
extraordinary supernatural thriller
ConstantHoogenbosch20 January 2006
Warning: Spoilers
Too bad it still isn't available on video or DVD. If you're lucky you'll find an ex-rental somewhere in the dungeons of some old videostore. But if you do....BUY IT!!!! This truly is one of a kind. I saw this movie many years ago en it still lingers in my mind. The setting is quite simple. An audience is watching a western in a cinema. Then suddenly a gunshot is heard and an man dies in his chair...shot. The police immediately starts an investigation and nobody is to leave the theater. The killer has to be in the building so it has to be just a matter of time that the killer will be found. But the strange thing is they cannot find him or any weapon. Further investigation reveals some strange facts and when they reenact the situation another man is killed in the same chair. And now for the big spoiler, so don't don't read any further than this if you don't want to know the twist: it is the cowboy in the film itself that shot both men and when they show the film for a third time the man in the dead man's chair panics when the gun is pointed at him from the screen. When he runs the cowboy on the screen follows him through the theater. Sounds rather silly but it isn't. This film is an chilling whodunit with a surprise ending (well, now that you know the ending not of course)
Supernatural Television Giallo by Italian Broadcaster RAI
ZeddaZogenau3 December 2023
This film by Giuliano Montaldo (Top Job (1968) and BRILLE MIT GOLDRAND / Glasses with Gold Rims (1987)) was actually produced by the Italian RAI as a television film, but was so original that it was also shown at the Berlinale 1978, which was held for the first time in February. Has been shown.
In a Milan cinema, an average audience is watching a spaghetti western. When there is a duel on the screen between Giuliano Gemma and William Berger, a shot is fired that fatally hits one of the moviegoers. The police are alerted, but are soon faced with a puzzle: no motive, no weapon! Through the interviews, the inspector (Brizio Montinaro) has already gotten to know some of the different visitors: a sociologist (Flavio Bucci) who puts forward steep theories, a drug dealer (Tony Kendall) who goes about his business with a friend under the cover of darkness, a married woman Ftrau (Aurore Clement), who secretly meets her lover at the cinema. It doesn't help at all! There is no usable trace! The inspector lets the film run again. And then this! At the same point in the film there is another fatal shot! Will the commissioner be able to solve this case...?
The dark cinema as a life-threatening place - this is the experience conveyed by this unjustly forgotten film, which combines giallo elements with the supernatural.
Worth seeing!
In a Milan cinema, an average audience is watching a spaghetti western. When there is a duel on the screen between Giuliano Gemma and William Berger, a shot is fired that fatally hits one of the moviegoers. The police are alerted, but are soon faced with a puzzle: no motive, no weapon! Through the interviews, the inspector (Brizio Montinaro) has already gotten to know some of the different visitors: a sociologist (Flavio Bucci) who puts forward steep theories, a drug dealer (Tony Kendall) who goes about his business with a friend under the cover of darkness, a married woman Ftrau (Aurore Clement), who secretly meets her lover at the cinema. It doesn't help at all! There is no usable trace! The inspector lets the film run again. And then this! At the same point in the film there is another fatal shot! Will the commissioner be able to solve this case...?
The dark cinema as a life-threatening place - this is the experience conveyed by this unjustly forgotten film, which combines giallo elements with the supernatural.
Worth seeing!
Low-watt, but pretty entertaining giallo
lazarillo27 March 2011
This one of a handful of Italian gialli that began life as a TV movie (the other two being "Secret of Seagull Island" and "Scorpion with Two Tails"). Like those, it lacks a lot of the sex, violence,and cinematic flourishes of other gialli, but it's a lot tighter (it wasn't condensed down from a mini-series like the other two), and it has a great plot: A large group of people are gathered in a cinema watching a spaghetti Western when one of them is found dead, killed by what by all accounts appears to be a "stray bullet". The police have to hold the increasingly restive crowd in the theater while they look into the victim's past to find out who may have killed him and why. . .
This movie has no really famous actors, but it does have an interesting cast. Flavio Buccio played a thug in both "The Night Train Murders" and Dario Argento's "Suspiria". He really plays against type here as a weird psychologist. Both William Berger and Guliano Gemma appear in the Western movie-within-a-movie. Berger was a pretty famous actor in the 60's and he is the father of both Debra ("Inglorious Bastards") Berger and Katya ("Absurd") Berger (but to my knowledge no relation to Helmut Berger). The teenage girl who first discovers the dead body is Elizabetta Virgili, later semi-famous in Italy as a nude centerfold and showgirl (she was in the erotic drama "Family Scandal" a few years later where she obviously showed a lot more than she does here). Although I don't know her name and I never saw her in anything else, my favorite though was the actress who played the old lady who becomes indignant that the police don't consider her a suspect and want to interrogate her.
Obviously, this is a pretty low-watt giallo, but it is an entertaining one.
This movie has no really famous actors, but it does have an interesting cast. Flavio Buccio played a thug in both "The Night Train Murders" and Dario Argento's "Suspiria". He really plays against type here as a weird psychologist. Both William Berger and Guliano Gemma appear in the Western movie-within-a-movie. Berger was a pretty famous actor in the 60's and he is the father of both Debra ("Inglorious Bastards") Berger and Katya ("Absurd") Berger (but to my knowledge no relation to Helmut Berger). The teenage girl who first discovers the dead body is Elizabetta Virgili, later semi-famous in Italy as a nude centerfold and showgirl (she was in the erotic drama "Family Scandal" a few years later where she obviously showed a lot more than she does here). Although I don't know her name and I never saw her in anything else, my favorite though was the actress who played the old lady who becomes indignant that the police don't consider her a suspect and want to interrogate her.
Obviously, this is a pretty low-watt giallo, but it is an entertaining one.
Closed circuit
BandSAboutMovies3 January 2024
Warning: Spoilers
As an audience comes together for an afternoon showing of a western* called I Giorno Dell'Ira starring Giuliano Gemma (A Pistol for Ringo, Arizona Colt), one of the moviegoers is shot by the actor. As his gun smokes on screen, an old man lies dying. The cops investigate and learn that nearly everyone has something to hide, from a couple having an affair to two small-time criminals (Tony Kendall is one of them), some student protesters and a sociologist (Flavio Bucci) who has the feeling that this is all like a Ray Bradbury story.
The police make everyone remain in the theater, basically living there, surviving off of the snack bar and meals brought in from the outside world. The entire situation is photographed and then run back, recreated, which leads to a second person being shot. This frustrates the inspector, who makes the entire theater remain and watch it again, with him sitting in the place where two men have already died.
This is a movie not just about a murder but movies itself. There are posters for Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, The Girl in Room 2A, Day of Anger, Torn Curtain, Four Flies On Grey Velvet, You'll Like My Mother, Squirm, The Perfume of the Lady In Black, King Kong, A*P*E* under the Italian name Super Kong and Tentacles. The moment that changes the movie, the gun being shot, changes the film from something that everyone is watching in a passive way to the most involving viewing they have ever seen. The film come alive, much like Cinema Paradiso or a movie that I am sure this had more than a small influence on, Demons.
Director Giuliano Montaldo made a movie that is at once a giallo and a science fiction story, as well as one that defies being easily figured out.
*It's actually E per tetto un cielo di stelle (A Sky Full of Stars for a Roof).
The police make everyone remain in the theater, basically living there, surviving off of the snack bar and meals brought in from the outside world. The entire situation is photographed and then run back, recreated, which leads to a second person being shot. This frustrates the inspector, who makes the entire theater remain and watch it again, with him sitting in the place where two men have already died.
This is a movie not just about a murder but movies itself. There are posters for Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, The Girl in Room 2A, Day of Anger, Torn Curtain, Four Flies On Grey Velvet, You'll Like My Mother, Squirm, The Perfume of the Lady In Black, King Kong, A*P*E* under the Italian name Super Kong and Tentacles. The moment that changes the movie, the gun being shot, changes the film from something that everyone is watching in a passive way to the most involving viewing they have ever seen. The film come alive, much like Cinema Paradiso or a movie that I am sure this had more than a small influence on, Demons.
Director Giuliano Montaldo made a movie that is at once a giallo and a science fiction story, as well as one that defies being easily figured out.
*It's actually E per tetto un cielo di stelle (A Sky Full of Stars for a Roof).
The outer limits of gialli
melvelvit-16 April 2010
Warning: Spoilers
The matinée audience for a spaghetti western are locked in the theater by the police after one of the viewers is shot dead during an on screen showdown. A perplexed inspector interviews the quirky, blasè patrons (including a pair of adulterers, a couple of drug dealers, a bathroom pervert, and a nerdy, audience-watching sociologist) one at a time and begins to realize most of them are being evasive for one reason or another. Getting nowhere fast with this motley crew, he decides to re-enact the crime as TV reporters and a gawking crowd begin to gather outside the cinema...
This is where it gets reely strange: with the cops stationed everywhere, an usher volunteers to sit in the dead man's seat as the movie is shown again -and he's also offed during the shootout in the western. The sociologist offers a very bizarre theory that the inspector is willing to listen to but the Commissioner doesn't buy it and insists the crime be re-enacted one last time with himself playing the victim ...uh oh.
Referencing a classic Ray Bradbury short story about children who imagine lions roaming the African veldt in their bedroom then lure their parents in to be devoured, this unique "science-fiction giallo" toys with the concept that TV and movie images define reality as man becomes a slave to his inventions. Unusual and thought-provoking, one viewing isn't enough to absorb it all (especially the wry social commentary) and I'm surprised this telefilm is so obscure -it deserves more. A reel find for me -for real.
This is where it gets reely strange: with the cops stationed everywhere, an usher volunteers to sit in the dead man's seat as the movie is shown again -and he's also offed during the shootout in the western. The sociologist offers a very bizarre theory that the inspector is willing to listen to but the Commissioner doesn't buy it and insists the crime be re-enacted one last time with himself playing the victim ...uh oh.
Referencing a classic Ray Bradbury short story about children who imagine lions roaming the African veldt in their bedroom then lure their parents in to be devoured, this unique "science-fiction giallo" toys with the concept that TV and movie images define reality as man becomes a slave to his inventions. Unusual and thought-provoking, one viewing isn't enough to absorb it all (especially the wry social commentary) and I'm surprised this telefilm is so obscure -it deserves more. A reel find for me -for real.
A weird one
Leofwine_draca16 March 2022
A very strange little movie which they describe as a giallo, although I'm not sure. It's more of a murder mystery that focuses almost exclusively on the police procedural investigation of a cinema shooting. Quite low budget, generally taking place in the cinema itself, and lacking the kind of style and incident this genre is known for. Perhaps remarkable for the unsolvable explanation at the climax, in which this turns out to be a very loose adaptation of a Ray Bradbury story.
Rare Italian thriller not many have seen
dimchris210 June 2011
The movie is inside a cinema screen when a group of people arrive to watch a movie. Suddenly when a shot is heard from the movie someone is shot for real inside the cinema and the police arrives to investigate the murder. Who killed him and who is the killer ...?
The police asks everyone to sit in their same positions as before and try to watch the movie again but when the gunshot is heard from in-the movie for the second time another person is shot for real ! this makes things more complicated for the police as there is no motive or suspects or evidence of gun found !!
The ending is what you don't expect ! A must seen movie I saw from a very old video tape copy a friend gave me ! don't miss it !
In Greece this movie was released as "Eglima choris dolofono" translated as "Crime with no killer" .
The police asks everyone to sit in their same positions as before and try to watch the movie again but when the gunshot is heard from in-the movie for the second time another person is shot for real ! this makes things more complicated for the police as there is no motive or suspects or evidence of gun found !!
The ending is what you don't expect ! A must seen movie I saw from a very old video tape copy a friend gave me ! don't miss it !
In Greece this movie was released as "Eglima choris dolofono" translated as "Crime with no killer" .
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