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Knife Under the Throat
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - 88 Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (6th December 2024). |
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The Film
 Erotic magazine model Catherine (Bizarre's Florence Guérin) is the girl who cried wolf, repeatedly bursting into the police station in torn clothes claiming to have been raped only to be greeted with laughter and derision by officers following the example of Commissioner Durieu (Sins of the Flesh's Francis Lemonnier). Not even her roommate Florence (Natasha Delange), her boss Valerie (Calvaire's Brigitte Lahaie), or her photographer J.B. (The Punishment's Jean-Pierre Maurin) believe her stories, dismissing her as a "loony" or a pathological liar. Her latest shoot at a cemetery that has her straddling gravestones and monuments so incenses repressed caretaker Victor (Joy & Joan's Pierre Londiche) that he starts stalking her. His desire to punish Catherine for her desecration is frustrated when he learns that she has gone to New York for a shoot so he vents his violent frustrations on an innocent young mourner before throwing himself in front of a truck. Upon returning to Paris, Catherine starts receiving ominous phone calls. Those her friends can believe since it goes with the territory of shock and provocation; however, only handsome new neighbor Nicolas (The Frog Prince's Alexandre Sterling) believes her when she claims someone tried to break into her apartment. When someone attacks Nicolas and then starts taking a switchblade to her colleagues and friends, Catherine cannot go to the police and she does not know who to suspect be it her junkie ex-boyfriend Ludovic (Lady Libertine's Emmanuel Karsen), her apartment building's scarred custodian Annie (Malvina Germain) who carries hedge clippers everywhere she goes, J.P. who gets violent when he is drunk and tries to pimp the models out for his benefit, or even Valerie who has nursed Nicolas back to health in her own bed and is jealous of his sympathetic attention to Catherine's perils… then again, the cemetery keeper might not actually be dead. The final film of Claude Mulot whose career started with one of France's first sexy horror films with The Blood Rose, a Gothic take on Eyes Without a Face, and had commercial ambitions with films like The Contract and Profession: Adventurers but worked out of necessity in the softcore and hardcore erotica genres with films like Sins of the Flesh and Pussy Talk – mostly under the pseudonym "Frédéric Lansac" derived from the protagonist of The Blood Rose – Knife Under the Throat has copious nudity from hardcore starlet and Jean Rollin softcore muse Lahaie and Guérin who had made a name for herself in The Click, a softcore adaptation of Milo Manera's sexy comic, but it was obviously another attempt by Mulot to go more mainstream before his life was cut short by a swimming pool accident at age forty-four the same year. The film does possess a slick eighties sheen shared with its Jess Franco contemporary Faceless also starring Lahaie and Guérin and produced by this film's distributor René Chateau despite a similarly low budget. The film has a novel twist and a relatively suspenseful and exciting climax; however, it is a long slog to get there for a film that runs only eighty minutes. After the setup, the film ambles along – not unlike some of the film's victims during moments where they should be more frantic – with not enough heat in its sex scenes to engender the necessary jealousy and relative restrained violence for a giallo-esque story. While Mulot might have wanted to get away from his sex film reputation, this is the type of film that could have used more titillation since one of its methods of padding the film to eighty minutes is showing flashbacks of the killer's machinations terrorizing Catherine and murdering her friends. Whereas a Dario Argento might depict the reveal in a few shots representative of their presence in each sequence, Mulot laboriously depicts the killer's perspective of scenes previously shown from Catherine's in their entirety before a rushed resolution calling back to her earlier crying wolf and then a requisite freeze frame shock ending that is on the surface illogical but perhaps suggesting that Catherine is vulnerable to one kind of nutcase or another regardless of the killer being dispatched. Mulot is no Argento-esque stylist, staging the kills in handheld POV single takes that seem lackadaisical rather than frenzied and scored with a cacophony of synthesizer music that never coalesces into anything resembling a theme. Performances are not really the focus but Guérin manages to convey her vulnerability with a worried expression while Lahaie also conveys both her icy jealousy and a hint of warmth. The best performance comes from Sterling who began the decade as the youthful love interest of Sophie Marceau in the immensely popular teen comedy La boum and its sequel. Had Mulot lived, one wonders whether he would have found work in other genres or at least better honed his skills in another sexy thriller or horror film, and if he would have looked back on his career's ups and downs in the same manner as Rollin or his other contemporaries who at one time could only find work in sex films. 
Video
Only released theatrically in France and Canada, Knife Under the Throat had a French DVD double feature with the Lahaie vehicle The Female Executioner in 2005. In 2020, French boutique label Le chat qui fume released the film on Blu-ray that also included the Mulot/Guérin film Black Venus as an extra. 88 Films' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray is derived from the same HD master. Colors pop with the eighties Fujifilm and Agfa blue leaning somewhat reining in the reds, and the image looks quite sharp and detailed with instances of softness evidence of the film's rushed shoot and hasty location blocking rather than defects of the processing or archival damage. 
Audio
The sole audio option is a French LPCM 2.0 mono track. Post-dubbed dialogue is always clear and well-synchronized while effects are rather sparse and the scoring undistinguished. Optional English subtitles are mostly free of errors but does make hash of the in-joke of Catherine's roommate Florence's surname turning out to be Guérin but spelling it "Guerien". 
Extras
The French Blu-ray had interviews with Lahaie and Guérin but 88 Films' extras consist of a gallery (0:58) and a brand new Lahaie interview in "Brigitte On Your Mind" (20:42) in which she reveals that Mulot directed one of her first hardcore films and her last which she had agreed to do because he promised to cast her in a more serious production which he failed to do when he helmed The Immoral One; as such, her opinion of him was low when it was boyfriend René Chateau who arranged for her to be cast in Knife Under the Throat. She commends Mulot more as a writer than as a director, noting the faults of the film including her performance in some scenes. She also describes Guérin as "full of herself" but was nevertheless responsible for introducing her to journalist Jean-Jacques Bourdin who she would work with later on in her career on French radio. She also compares working with Mulot to working with Max Pécas as well as discussing Chateau's role in introducing her to various filmmakers including Abel Ferrara who offered her a role in Dangerous Game. 
Overall
Knife Under the Throat is rather underwhelming as eighties erotic or slasher horror, its interests lie in being the last film of Claude Mulot and a rare French genre entry in the eighties. 
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