A young couple veer off the road in an accident and wake up near a villa where they are hosted by another young couple who seem intent on making them stay for as long as possible. As the days pass, the recovering couple realise they are being manipulated by their hosts who have ulterior motives for keeping them there.

From the brief plot description you would probably expect A Game For Eveline to be a typical giallo with all the usual trappings of the genre; the mysterious hosts, the secluded villa and some ghosts in the night, just for good measure. But while it does contain all these things, the main emphasis is on something altogether quite different…

It reminded me (a lot) of Roberto Mauri’s thoroughly underrated masterpiece Madeleine: Anatomy of a Nightmare (1974) which covers much of the same ground but in a far more dynamic fashion – probably because Mauri clearly had a much higher budget to work with. A Game For Eveline can’t have cost much to make; four principal actors, a villa, and a crew of probably no more than a handful of people. No doubt this is also one of the reasons why it has remained so obscure and generally forgotten about – at the time of writing (2020) it only exists as a telecine copy circulated on the web – and it has never had any kind of official release beyond it’s run in the cinemas way back in 1972.

According to lead actress Erna (Le Salamndre) Schurer and Renato Polselli regular Rita Calderoni, who makes a brief cameo appearance, the film was shot in Palermo.

Links

Review by Pieropaolo De Sanctis – Nocturno (Italian) and more info over at Davinotti (Italian)

Locandina

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According to the official government censorship certificate archived on the ItaliaTaglia website, the following cuts were made:

La IV Sezione della Commissione di Revisione Cinematografica revisionato il film invita il regista e il rappresentante della produzione a operare il taglio della scena in cui appare Philips che bacia Nathalie nella parte genitale, sia pure coperta, e poi i due amanti appaiono in una sfrenata, vorticosa, libidinosa e oscena battaglia erotica, in modo che la narrazione del film riprenda dal momento in cui i due discutono sul letto. Il rappresentante e il regista si riservano di accettare il suddetto taglio – La Commissione sospende ogni giudizio […] La Commissione, esaminato il taglio richiesto, esprime parere favorevole per la proiezione in pubblico senza limitazioni di età.