Perhaps this was plausible back in the innocent 60s, but now there's just too much stretching of credibility for this movie to be effective. It's hard to be seriously frightened when what the bad guys are doing is impossible to believe.
Would real drug dealers go to such lengths for what appears to be perhaps a quarter of a kilo of heroin, street value $20,000, tops? Would serious bad guys engage in elaborate measures, including costumes and play-acting, in an attempt to fool Susie into revealing the location of the doll? In real life, one of them would put a knife to her throat in scene one, and that would be that.
Other things just misfire. Would a bad guy intent on terrorizing Susie splash gasoline all around, and then light a match, virtually assuring self-immolation just to scare her? For that matter, how many New Yorkers would leave a front door unlocked, with a note, no less, telling anyone who comes by that the door is unlocked, come on in? That's how Mike and Carlino get in so easily at the start, and how plausible is it that Carlino, instead of participating in the search for the doll, raids the refrigerator and lazily fixes himself a sandwich?
That's the weakness of this movie, in this modern era: it's so implausible that it's not convincing, and hence isn't particularly frightening. We know much more, I'm afraid, about drugs and drug dealing and drug dealers, than we did in 1967.
Would real drug dealers go to such lengths for what appears to be perhaps a quarter of a kilo of heroin, street value $20,000, tops? Would serious bad guys engage in elaborate measures, including costumes and play-acting, in an attempt to fool Susie into revealing the location of the doll? In real life, one of them would put a knife to her throat in scene one, and that would be that.
Other things just misfire. Would a bad guy intent on terrorizing Susie splash gasoline all around, and then light a match, virtually assuring self-immolation just to scare her? For that matter, how many New Yorkers would leave a front door unlocked, with a note, no less, telling anyone who comes by that the door is unlocked, come on in? That's how Mike and Carlino get in so easily at the start, and how plausible is it that Carlino, instead of participating in the search for the doll, raids the refrigerator and lazily fixes himself a sandwich?
That's the weakness of this movie, in this modern era: it's so implausible that it's not convincing, and hence isn't particularly frightening. We know much more, I'm afraid, about drugs and drug dealing and drug dealers, than we did in 1967.