I had a little birthday money lying around and decided to go on a little Amazon shopping spree. One of the things I was most excited about was Mill Creek’s Drive In Movie Classics which is a 12 disc, 50 movie pack that I’m sure will have me pulling my hair out by the time I finally finish up with it somewhere in the future. Unfortunately, the first movie in the set is a boring, complicated snoozer called The Devil Has Seven Faces which was written by Tito Carpi and Osvaldo Civirani who also directed. Maybe something gets lost in the translation from the Italian (the original title is Il diavolo a sette facce) or maybe it’s just a movie that doesn’t make any sense.

The movie revolves around Carroll Baker who plays twins, one of whom is a jewel thief and the other who gets confused for her and hassled by a bunch of people. Now, I’m not sure how sisters who are in different  countries get mistaken for one another, but it happens. Eventually the main version of Baker heads to…some other country where people are still after her, of course. She gets involved with two men who look and sound alike, but are about 20 years apart in age. As the movie went on, it get less interesting to me, but it also, as you might expect, got more and more confusing. There’s a scene where two guys show up in Baker’s apartment after a date with the younger go. The attackers run outside where two cops are. One attacker shoots a cop and the other cop shoots an attacker. While the surviving cop is checking on his co-worker the younger guy (who was still in the house with Baker) comes out and hits the cop in the head and they run away. Now, this ends up making a little bit more sense later on when things start coming out in the open, but while watching it, I just kept scratching my head. There are some interesting foot chases at the end of the movie, but overall it’s pretty boring.

Now, a few random notes. This woman’s lighter looks like a blowtorch. The transfer on this movie wasn’t great, but I wasn’t expecting much. I kind of like seeing all the scratches and whatnot. I don’t like seeing the Mill Creek logo pop up while I’m watching a movie though. This isn’t a screener and I already know what I bought, so stop advertising!

Okay, I can’t resist, call this SPOILER territory if you care. The whole twist at the end of the movie is that the twin we’ve been following actually has the diamond that was stolen. They revealed this right after I thought to myself “I wonder why the director keeps showing shots of the woman’s cigarette package. Then it hit me that, of course, that’s where the diamond must be. At the very end, though, two cops are talking and one explains to the other that the REAL diamond was never stolen because it was really in a safe deposit box. Oh, and the younger of the two guys was really a bad guy after the diamond and the older one knew the deal the whole time. Now, I’m not sure if the twin we’ve been following was really who she said she was or not or what the hell was going on. So, I’m not sure if you watched this movie a second time around (assuming you either followed it or enjoyed it enough the first time) if everything makes sense. It could be a really intricately written script like Usual Suspects, or it could be a piece of nonsense like the horror film High Tension which was pretty rad up until the end made the rest of the movie not make sense. I doubt I’ll watch again, but maybe if someone else out there saw it and liked it, they could tell me the deal.

Score: I need a second opinion, but I’m leaning towards blech.