Released a year after the success of his first Giallo, Sergio Martino's The Case Of The Scorpion's Tail is tense and very polished film with a fine cast of Eurocult regulars and a couple of nicely executed kill scenes.

When a well to do local businessman named Kurt Baumer is found dead supposedly because of his involvement in an airplane accident (created using a miniature airplane that is so painfully obvious in its scale as to be quite laughable) his young and rather unfaithful wife Lisa (Ida Galli, often known as Evelyn Stewart and star of Lucio Fulci's Seven Notes In Black) is almost a little too happy to be cashing in on her late beau's sizeable life insurance pay off. When the insurance company starts to dig a little deeper into the events that took the man's life, they become understandably suspicious of little Lisa Baumer and, in the interests of protecting their business, they send in an investigator named Peter Lynch (played by George Hilton of The Strange Vice Of Mrs. Wardh and All The Colors Of The Dark) to make sure that Lisa's story is on the up and up.

While Peter is running around trying to piece the puzzle together and Lisa is trying to avoid all of the money grubbing friends and associates of her late husband who have come out of the woodwork since she received her settlement, Kurt's mistress (Janine Raynaud of Jess Franco's Sadisterotica and Succubus) gets herself a lawyer and figures she can take a piece of the pie for herself and even go so far as to finger Lisa as the real reason that Kurt has gone on to the great board room in the sky.

When Lisa also winds up dead and her insurance money missing, Peter kicks things into high gear and sets out to solve the crime and set things right once and for all but as luck would have it, a cop named Inspector Stavros (Luigi Pistilli of The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly and Bay Of Blood) thinks her might have played a part in it too. Throw in a nosey reporter named Cleo Dupont (Anita Strindberg of Lizard In A Woman's Skin and The Antichrist) who may or may not find herself the next victim, and you can see how Peter's got his work cut out for him.

Like The Strange Vice Of Mrs. Wardh made a year earlier, The Case Of The Scorpion's Tale is a text book case of a classic Giallo. Martino's film moves along at a brisk pace but doesn't skimp out on things like character details and the plot is a nicely constructed thriller that does a fine job of keeping the viewer involved in the guessing game, even if it does borrow a plot device or two from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and from Mario Bava's Blood And Black Lace.

The cast is exceptionally good as well. No one plays a cranky cop better than Pistilli and his interaction with the ever so suave Hilton makes for some interesting on screen chemistry, as does Hilton's relationship with the sultry Ms. Strindberg. The interplay between the leads make the movie interesting and the characters a little more believable that your average Giallo. The visuals for the film are on par with everything else discussed this far – they're top notch. Plenty of shadowy lighting and smooth, fluid camera work ensure that the Italian sets are captured in all of their architectural glory and that the funky Eurotrash furniture and decor look as good as they can.

While it isn't quite as well constructed as his Giallo debut with The Strange Vice Of Mrs. Wardh or with his masterpiece in the genre, All The Colors Of The Dark, Sergio Martino's The Case Of The Scorpion's Tale is a fine whodunnit with more than enough flesh and blood in it to keep things interesting and fun throughout.

Video:

The Case Of The Scorpion's Tail gets a great 2.35.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that looks incredible for a film of this age. The film has been re-mastered from the original negative and it looks excellent. Print damage is almost completely non-existent save for a speck or two noticeable in a few scenes. Aside from a hint of film grain in a few of the darker scenes, this transfer is pretty close to perfect. Edge enhancement isn't a problem and there are no issues with mpeg compression artifacts. The colors look very nice and quite bold and the flesh tones look very life like. The black levels stay strong and deep and don't get murky at all.