Many Italian horror helmers have taken a stab at adapted Edgar Allan Poe's venerable short story, "The Black Cat," including Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and (sort of) Luigi Cozzi. The first Italian director to attempt a legitimate stab at the material, Martino performs a gender-flip on the main characters and integrates the story into a larger tableaux of nefarious doings at the remote Rouvigny estate, where brutal Oliviero (Twitch of the Death Nerve's Luigi Pistilli) torments his wife, Irina (Anita Strindberg), at parties filled with exhibitionist hippies prone to breaking out in song and dancing on the dinner table. As much as she hates her husband, Irina (who evidently hasn't seen Diabolique) also feels great animosity towards their pet cat, Satan, and isn't much happier with the fact that Oliviero, who harbors a strange fetish for Mary, Queen of Scots, is messing around with a pretty bookseller on the side. After their maid turns up slashed to death on the staircase, the not-so-happy couple finds even more disturbance with the arrival of Oliviero's sexy niece, Floriana (Edwige Fenech), who gets her kicks from going to motocross races and seducing everyone in sight. Meanwhile a sinister bewigged stranger (Ivan Rassimov) lurks around the estate with murder in his eyes...but is someone else really responsible for all this bloodshed?
A wild ride from its slinky opening credits to its tire-screeching climax, this thriller moves its suspicious characters from one position to the next in appropriately chesspiece-like fashion, generating the necessary amount of gory and sexy thrills along the way. In many respects this feels like a warm-up for Martino's next and final giallo, Torso, which appropriates a similar opening titles sequence, disjointed structure, and "exotic" red-herring black female cast member. For some reason Martino also shot both of these films flat instead of scope, a major visual departure from his previous efforts. All of the usual Martino cohorts are here and accounted for, including composer Bruno Nicolai (turning in one of his most melodic scores), cinematographer Giancarlo Ferrando, and, of course, screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi, who could write things like this in his sleep. However, this is really the actors' show all the way, with Pistilli and Lindberg ripping into their juicy, venomous roles with absolute glee; likewise, the always worthwhile Fenech has a field day playing several degrees more wicked than her usual doe-eyed damsels in distress.
A mainstay on the bootleg market, Your Vice previously appeared in a bootleg DVD edition from "Eurovista" culled from a screener videotape; fortunately it's rendered obsolete many times over by NoShame's ravishing presentation, transferred from the original negative. Flagged for progressive scan (a nice switch from the company’s previous titles), the presentation looks absolutely razor-sharp and colorful without any damage or digital bugaboos in sight. The film can be played with a serviceable English soundtrack or the somewhat classier Italian version (with optional English subtitles); both are looped and only match the actors' mouths every once in a while, so the Italian version (which modifies some of the more racist dialogue to improved effect) might be preferable for most viewers. No trailer is included for this film, but the disc does throw in trailers for the rest of NoShame's Martino releases including The Strange Vice of Signora Ward, The Case of the Scorpion's Tail, The Big Alligator River and Gambling City, as well as a poster and still gallery. The real treat here is a 23-minute featurette, "Unveiling the Vice," in which Martino, Fenech and Gastaldi; the director reveals that this "decadent" film wasn't one of his favorites and is inferior to Torso, while Fenech comments, "All I remember is huge onion omelets!"
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by Nathaniel Thompson
