Review of Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971) by Stephen M — 13 Feb 2014

A disappointing giallo. The premise is relatively strong - an American journalist in Prague is discovered in a cataleptic stupor, mistaken for dead and delivered to the morgue; will he snap out of it before his own autopsy? - but the flashback story binding the thing together, some random guff about a missing girlfriend and a group of Satanists, is thoroughly dreary and too short on incident.

Distinguished only by the presence of Ingrid Thulin and a below-par Morricone score, the best I can say of Short Night of Glass Dolls is that, like many another giallo (The Perfume of the Lady in Black, The House with Laughing Windows, etc), at least it has the courage of its own grisly convictions; the ending is almost worth waiting for.