One Paragraph Movie Review: The Bird With the Crystal Plumage

Three hundredth(!) film: L’Ucello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo, or The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, an English-language, weirdly-dubbed Italian thriller from 1970. An entertaining watch with parma-hammy acting, the story centres around an American writer living in Italy who witnesses an attempted murder and becomes obsessed with investigating it, putting his girlfriend — who represents exactly the serial murderer’s taste — in danger doing so. I spent the whole movie concentrating very hard on what the motives and links behind each murder might, enjoying their melodramatic, music-drowned tackiness, only to discover that my energy was wasted. In an extremely unconvincing twist, the story kind of shrugs and says “well, that’s insanity for ya”. Not bad, super dumb, and with a pre-DNA crime-solving computer that analyses the evidence and narrows the culprit down to 150,000 suspects. Two and three-quarter dangerously suspended ugly sculptures out of five.