Verdict
Summary
A heist thriller cross-pollinated with a giallo, A Hyena in the Safe is pretty much exactly as advertised with an Agatha Christie-type structure set almost entirely in one location with a limited amount of shifty-eyed characters to be picked off. Director Cesare Canevari manages to keep the location interesting with stylish camera angles and a cast of characters who all look unique and sleazy (even the women have a weird worn out tint to them), and so the movie is certainly never boring. Fans of Italian crime and slasher films will appreciate this one for mashing up the genres.
Plot:
Six thieves meet up eleven months later to divide their loot, resulting in a series of killings.
Review:
Eleven months after stealing a huge safe full of diamonds, six thieves, plus a newcomer – a girlfriend of one of the men – meet up in a huge house to pool their six individual keys together to finally open the safe and divvy up the loot. But there’s a big problem: The safe will only open if all six keys are inserted, and one of them (the drug addicted heroin addict who brought a girlfriend no one knows) has misplaced his key. The others take away his heroin until he coughs up the key, and when he comes up empty, the others strip his girlfriend naked, search her for the key too, and find nothing. As the drug addict drives himself up a wall going through withdrawals, he’s mysteriously pushed out the window and dies. The others wait around for his key to magically appear, and during the interim, other in the group start showing up dead, their keys up for grabs. In a heartbeat, alliances in the house start to form; the women gravitate to the men using seduction, hoping that they’ll be protected when the killer – or killers – come for them next. Before long, two of the three women have sold their sex for protection, but it doesn’t take a genius to realize that there are secret microphones and cameras hidden throughout the house that the killer is using to best lay traps for the others. Soon, one “hyena” will be left with all six keys …
A heist thriller cross-pollinated with a giallo, A Hyena in the Safe is pretty much exactly as advertised with an Agatha Christie-type structure set almost entirely in one location with a limited amount of shifty-eyed characters to be picked off. Director Cesare Canevari manages to keep the location interesting with stylish camera angles and a cast of characters who all look unique and sleazy (even the women have a weird worn out tint to them), and so the movie is certainly never boring. Fans of Italian crime and slasher films will appreciate this one for mashing up the genres.
Celluloid Dreams brings A Hyena in the Safe to Blu-ray in a sharp full-frame (1:33:1) transfer, and it comes with its original Italian language track, plus a commentary, interviews, an image gallery, a trailer, and more.
