The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971) is not a supernatural tale, but a gothic tale of madness. The film gets off the ground with a "kill the hooker" scene without even a gore pay-off to justify its misogyny as sleezy giallo entertainment. We soon understand that Allan (Antonio De Teffe) is deeply unhappy about his psychotic breaks during which he murders red-headed women who remind him of his late wife who died in childbirth.

His psychiatrist Richard (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) is attempting to cure him, & in the meantime helps cover up his crimes.

Curiously Allan is a sympathetic character, an irrational reality that is the only thing novel in the whole damned tale. The villains of the piece are the ones driving him to further insanity, hoping to make him catatonic in order to take over his great wealth.

There are some interesting side-characters like the pale girl in the wheelchair, but just as we're starting to be curious about her, she gets killed & her corpse fed to the foxes. When plot twists begin happening near the end of a boring set of murders, it's too late to make the film particularly interesting.

The best bits are perhaps the fake supernaturalism at the crypt of the dead wife, but "best" in this case means marginally less moronic than everything else about the film.

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