There are gialli you admire, and then there are gialli you endure. The Red Queen Kills Seven Times falls into the latter. It’s the kind of film that has everything going for it—gothic trappings, a family curse, a masked killer in a flowing red cape, and the ever-alluring Barbara Bouchet—and somehow fumbles the entire operation like it tripped on its own heel.
Directed by Emilio Miraglia and released in 1972, the film is often bundled with The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, Miraglia’s previous gothic-meets-giallo outing. Both films have their share of diehard defenders in the cult cinema world, but Red Queen, for all its sumptuous design and high-concept premise, ends up as a hollow experience. It’s beautiful, yes—but cold, clunky, and painfully uneven.
If you’re here for stylish violence, psychological intensity, or a satisfying twist—prepare to wait. And wait. And wait some more.
👑 A Killer Title That Promises Too Much
Let’s start with that title: The Red Queen Kills Seven Times. It sounds like a Sergio Martino fever dream, or something Dario Argento would’ve used to stage a baroque slaughterhouse inside a palace. Instead, what we get is a film that sounds like it’s chasing seven victims, but forgets to build the tension around any of them. The body count drips along slowly, the mystery dissolves into murky exposition, and the “Red Queen” herself—who should be iconic—is barely a presence.
That’s the most frustrating part: the idea is good. There’s real potential in the backstory. The Wildenbrück family is supposedly cursed—every hundred years, the Red Queen rises from the dead to kill seven people in revenge. The film opens with a flashback of two young sisters reenacting this legend. A scuffle, a scream, a girl dead. Then we jump to the present.
Enter Kitty Wildenbrück (Barbara Bouchet), now grown and working at a high-end fashion firm, and her older sister Franziska (Marina Malfatti), who seems to be keeping some serious skeletons in the family closet.
When their grandfather is mysteriously killed and Kitty’s long-absent younger sister Evelyn is presumed dead, the murders begin—one by one, seemingly fulfilling the ancient prophecy. But is it supernatural? A clever ruse? Or just bad plotting?
🎭 Barbara Bouchet Deserved a Better Movie
Let’s be clear: Barbara Bouchet is this film’s best asset. She’s luminous, composed, and genuinely compelling—even when the script treats her like window dressing.
As Kitty, Bouchet plays the emotionally fragile center of the mystery. She’s haunted by childhood trauma, tormented by dreams, and surrounded by people who may or may not be lying to her at all times. Bouchet brings a real vulnerability to the role, mixed with that cool, European detachment that defined many of her giallo performances. She’s not just a pretty face—she’s acting, even if the movie rarely gives her enough to work with.
But that’s the problem: Kitty doesn’t do much. She reacts, she panics, she looks shocked as other people move the plot around her. It’s the classic underwritten female lead in a giallo—beautiful, imperiled, vaguely psychic, but ultimately passive. Bouchet gives it weight anyway, but the movie doesn’t rise to meet her.
🧊 Marina Malfatti: Wasted as the Ice Queen Sister
Marina Malfatti, who could easily play brooding aristocrats in her sleep, is sadly wasted here as Franziska, the more coldly calculating of the two sisters. She floats in and out of scenes like a ghost haunting her own subplot.
Franziska should be the delicious counterpoint to Kitty—calm, manipulative, perhaps even hiding a knife behind her back. Instead, she’s simply opaque. You can never tell if she’s in on the conspiracy or just bored by it.
It’s not that Malfatti is bad—she’s not. It’s that the film can’t figure out how to use her. The tension between the sisters never truly ignites, and that leaves a massive emotional void at the story’s center.
🩸 The Murders: Death by Schedule
For a film built around a prophecy that someone will kill seven people, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times is shockingly inert when it comes to its murders.
They happen. People die. But there’s no buildup, no escalation, no artistry. Victims appear, then disappear from the story as quickly as the blade that dispatches them. The Red Queen herself—a figure who should be dripping with menace and dread—appears in a scarlet cloak and proceeds to stab or chase people in the most unimaginative ways possible.
One death involves dogs. Another involves a drowning. One guy gets stabbed in a car. It’s all so pedestrian. Where is the flair? Where is the madness? In a genre known for outrageous kill sequences and visual violence, Red Queen feels almost apologetic about its own bloodshed.
Even the killer’s costume—a red cloak with hood—is more Halloween party at the Count’s manor than nightmare fuel. She’s not frightening. She’s not even all that memorable.
🏰 Style Without Substance
Here’s the thing: the movie looks great.
Emilio Miraglia and cinematographer Alberto Spagnoli create a slick surface—opulent mansions, dimly lit corridors, eerie paintings, fashion runways, graveyards. The palette moves from gothic gloom to modernist glamour, which should work in contrast. But instead, it comes off disjointed. Tonally, the film can’t decide what it wants to be. Is this an old-world ghost story or a jet-set murder mystery?
There are moments of real visual beauty. A dream sequence involving Kitty being chased through the castle corridors by the Red Queen is stylish and surreal. Some of the early framing—Kitty in oversized stairwells, the camera peeking through antique furniture—has that voyeuristic giallo vibe down perfectly.
But all of that collapses under the weight of a story that never builds momentum. The film becomes a series of pretty, disconnected scenes—like watching a fashion show directed by someone who forgot to write an ending.
📉 The Pacing: Slow, Slower, Dead
The fatal flaw here is pacing. The movie never finds its rhythm.
It opens with promise—a creepy flashback, a sudden death—but soon gets bogged down in subplot after subplot. There’s a murder investigation. A mysterious inheritance. A secret love affair. A creepy painting. Boardroom drama. A missing person case. A possible faked death. It’s like the screenwriters couldn’t decide what to focus on, so they threw in everything.
By the time you get to the supposed “reveal,” you’re too exhausted to care. The twist is convoluted without being clever, and the motives feel retroactively patched together.
This isn’t Tenebrae, where the sleight-of-hand leads to a shocking payoff. This is just a story that makes noise for ninety minutes and then quietly explains itself like a guilty teenager.
🎼 The Score: Nicolai Tries to Save It
Bruno Nicolai, longtime Morricone collaborator, delivers a haunting and occasionally lovely score. It’s baroque, eerie, and sophisticated—the kind of music that makes you believe something important is happening, even when it isn’t.
It’s almost too good for this film. The music builds moods the script can’t sustain. You’ll hear a chilling choral swell as a character walks down a hallway—and then the scene just fizzles out. Nicolai is composing for a better movie, and the disconnect is obvious.
🧩 The Ending: A Twist You’ll Forget Tomorrow
When the big reveal arrives, it’s not satisfying. It’s not even shocking. The film simply tells you what happened via exposition dump. The Red Queen wasn’t who you thought. A conspiracy was afoot. Motives are explained like a bored detective finishing paperwork.
There’s no elegance to it. No “a-ha!” moment. Just a tired wrap-up that feels like it was edited together over lunch. In a genre that thrives on clever misdirection and gut-punch reveals, Red Queen ends with a whimper.
👍 So, Why Watch It?
Three words: Barbara. Bouchet. Period.
She’s the only reason this movie stays on its feet. Even when the story wanders into nonsense, she grounds it with grace. She looks haunted, radiant, real. She’s the eye of the storm, the only performance with gravity.
Watch it for her. Watch it for the occasional gothic flourish. Watch it for the dream that maybe it could’ve been something better.
👎 Why Skip It?
Because you’ve already seen better gialli. Because it’s slow, messy, and dull. Because the Red Queen—this alleged icon of murder and madness—barely registers. Because style without tension is like a knife with no edge.
🩸 Final Verdict: The Red Queen Kills Seven Times… But Bores Eight
In the grand catalog of giallo cinema, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times is all cape and no dagger. It teases a baroque nightmare and delivers a slow, disjointed slog.
The visuals are pretty. The cast is attractive. Barbara Bouchet is magnetic.
But the film itself? It forgets the rules of suspense. It forgets how to seduce. It forgets how to scare. And in a genre where forgetting even one of those things is a sin, forgetting all three is a death sentence.
You’ll come for the Queen. But by the end, you’ll be begging for a new reign.
