The Bloodstained Butterfly

The Bloodstained Butterfly details the legal shenanigans that ensue after a man is arrested for a crime he seemingly didn’t commit, with the narrative focused mostly on said crime’s investigation (and trial) and the impact these events have on a wide variety of laughably underdeveloped characters. Though it opens with a fair amount of promise – the film irresistibly introduces the protagonists through onscreen title cards (a la the opening credits of a television show) – The Bloodstained Butterfly almost immediately segues into a deliberately-paced and hopelessly repetitive narrative revolving almost entirely around the aforementioned investigation and trial. The picture, which plays out like an especially tedious episode of Law and Order, boasts exceedingly few elements designed to sustain the viewer’s waning interest, and it doesn’t help, certainly, that scripters Gianfranco Clerici and Duccio Tessari have populated the thin narrative with an unreasonably large assortment of one-dimensional figures (ie it’s impossible to care about their ongoing exploits and, ultimately, to even tell them apart from one another.) Director Tessari’s third-act efforts at cultivating suspense and tension fall completely flat, to be sure, and it is, in the end, difficult to understand how The Bloodstained Butterfly is considered a minor classic within the giallo genre.

* out of ****