Review of The Scorpion with Two Tails

Damn you Sergio Martino and your constant re-using of titles! Here I was under the impression that I finally tracked down a copy of "Case of the Scorpion's Tail" and then it turns out this is an entirely different movie, actually one that is even more rare but also a whole lot worse. Then I wanted to take comfort in the fact this production stars the almighty B-movie legend John Saxon, but he's only in it during the first EIGHT minutes and then he has his neck wrenched around 180 degrees! "The Scorpion with two Tails" is undeniably a disappointment, mixing too many story ideas and cult sub genres into one overly confusing film. The plot covers typical giallo-elements as well as supernatural forces of evil and even crime syndicates! However, none of the story lines are properly elaborated and the whole thing is just intolerably incoherent. Mr. Saxon briefly appears as an American archaeologist who phones his wife to announce he discovered a genuine Etruscan tomb during his research expedition in Italy. He then gets killed and the wife Joan instantly travels to Italy to investigate the circumstances of his death. She learns that her own beloved father runs an international hard drugs network, hallucinates about eerie maggots crawling around everywhere and eventually hooks up with another archaeologist that fancies Etruscan tombs. Every once and a while, a redundant character is killed off by a pair of unidentifiable hands that clearly adore twisting people's necks around! Sergio Martino is a great director, and Ernesto Gastaldi is an even greater scriptwriter, but "The Scorpion with two Tails" totally lacks all their usual trademarks. It's uninvolving, boring, slow-paced, poorly presented and the murder sequences are tame and entirely gore-free! The neck-twisting modus operandi is interesting to show once, but not seven times in one film! The search for the killer's identity – if he/she is even human – isn't nearly as compelling as in any of Martino's previous gialli and features no ingenious red herrings. Heck, even the music is lame since it's identical to the score in "Hell of the Living Dead" and that film already stole it from Goblin's soundtrack for "Dawn of the Dead". Nothing to recommend here, not even to die-hard fans of Italian cinema.