Tranquil America of the early twentieth century is the setting for Joe D'Amato's (billed here under his real name, Aristide Massaccesi) first plunge into the sex and horror genre, in which he would go on to be somewhat of a pioneer. The film opens with a mournful man by the name of Frans doting over his sister Greta's lifeless corpse. Caressing her enticing frame, a flood of memories overcomes him as he recalls the many warm experiences he had with her. However, his composure soon turns vengeful, as he recalls her last days and the hands at which her fate was sealed. The film truly begins with an elongated flashback playing out in Frans' mind, where Greta, her horse carriage taking a nasty spill and leaving her unconscious, soon becomes at the mercy of the nearby neighbors. She is soon laid up in bed and examined by a mysterious physician, Dr. Sturges (Klaus Kinski) and diagnosed with amnesia. Stripped of her memory, Greta recuperates in the Good Samaritans' household and eventually befriends her caretakers and becomes an integral part of their elitist society. In addition, she manages to win the hearts of a married couple, Walter and Eva. Not only does Greta break their marital vows, but a strange chain of murders begins to crop up around the mysterious guest as she continues her stay. The explanation to such mysteries includes no more than supernatural revenge, medical science that can bring back the dead, and many hallucinatory twists and turns challenging the coherency of the tale's fabric.

Easily one of D'Amato's most ambitious and accomplished works (and a tremendously confident genre debut), DEATH SMILES AT MURDER is a challenging film indeed. D'Amato not so much asks of the viewer as demands them to sit up and take notice of every plot twist and wrinkle in the grand scheme of the film. The film's pacing is brilliantly fragmented, with each major occurrence a mere piece of the jigsaw puzzle, which the viewer is left to come to terms with on their own. Frans' myriad flashbacks during the initial steps of the film provide an effective springboard for a handful of deliriously romantic and seductive imagery. The scenes where Frans and Greta frolic in a lush garden vividly anticipate Elke Sommer's romantic and haunting flashbacks in Mario Bava's 1974 masterpiece LISA AND THE DEVIL. Both films also share a doomed romanticism, where happiness and true love seem powerless to all-engulfing mortality. Finally, both films share a fragmented narrative that elicits suspicion in the viewer concerning the plausibility of the protagonist's perspective.
Aiding the film in its mission to mystify and often bewilder is D'Amato's atypically imaginative camerawork. Brandishing kinetic camerawork and surreal dissolves with taut editing, D'Amato reaches (and often maintains) a sphere of madness and desperation in many key scenes. One such scene, where Kinski dangles a mysterious necklace over the visage of Greta, is both upsetting and bizarre, due in no small part to D'Amato's tight close-ups of Kinski's grooved face, and the warped Dutch angles of his gnarled hands pressed tightly to the lens. In addition to striking sequences, an abundance of lasting images graces the film. Most powerful of which is the moonlit figure of a vengeful Greta, cloaked in a wispy red dress, icily glancing down at Eva over the cobblestone steps. D'Amato's sense of blocking and framing is also curiously superior here, constructing many memorable compositions.

And if there was one aspect in which DEATH truly excels, it would be that of a tangible atmosphere of dread, nicely complemented by accurate historical settings. The whole of the cast is nicely clothed in historically accurate attire, and the aura of the film, compared to such shameless sleaze as D'Amato's many Emanuelle films, seems almost snooty in comparison. But that isn't a problem. In fact, if an uninitiated viewer of the director's body of work began with this very film, it would hardly be surprising to conjecture the viewer passing off D'Amato as a Mario Bava disciple.

Augmenting the upper-crust social ambience is an equally refined and intelligent score by Berto Pisano. Emphasizing sparse percussion and experimental guitar riffs interspersed with ethereal vocals, the score could even make Death crack a smile. Although often serene and contemplative, Pisano's score is robustly dynamic, sprouting many scenes' atmospheric potential. At other times Pisano tactfully omits any musical accompaniment, permitting the viewer to peruse the ghastly goings-on in their own time. Such an instance in which Kinski's lab, with its pickled organs and caged rats, profits greatly from neutral silence, making the long tracking shots of his lair all the more introspective and appealing.

Finally, despite the film's more reserved and seemingly benign attributes, DEATH still cannot escape the requirement of at least a few gory demises. But unlike the director's subsequent work, D'Amato doesn't scrap the emotional potential of a painful cinematic death. In particular, the sequence where Gertrude, the family maid, is brutally blasted point blank by a shotgun, is jarring and effective. Her face bubbling with buckshot, Gertrude dies a grisly death, smoothly juxtaposing the film's ubiquitous serenity with sporadic bloodletting.

Sure, there are more foul slayings in the film, but what one will ultimately take away from the film is a feeling most evocative of mystification. But for at least once in this exploitation filmmaker's career, the viewer's intelligence is not insulted. If nothing else, DEATH proves an effective counterexample to the assumption that D'Amato's porn/horror films appeal more to the area below the waist than above the neck.