INFERNAL TRIO (1974)
aka Le Trio infernal
Article 2509 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-16-2008
Posting Date: 6-25-2008
Directed by Francis Girod
Featuring Michel Piccoli, Romy Schneider, Mascha Gonska
Country: France/West Germany/Italy

A French man and two German sisters engage in a series of insurance-bilking scams.

What’s the fantastic content in this French black comedy? A goodly portion of the middle of this movie involves a rather horrific sequence where the insurance-bilkers (the trio of the title) engage in a bloody double murder and use a particularly disgusting method of body disposal; these sequences push the movie into horror territory, though the movie never really turns into outright horror. This one was very difficult to follow; I was a good fifteen minutes into this before I was able to pick up any sort of plot thread that could help me figure out what was going on, and even after having seen the entire movie, I’m still not sure about the significance of sizable chunks of the movie. It might make more sense on a second viewing, now that I have more of a sense of what’s going on, certain early scenes might sort themselves out. I had to read some of the user comments on IMDB to help me with this one; it was apparently based on true events that happened in the twenties. As usual, since this is a French movie, I saw comments talking about its political subtexts in which the word “bourgeoisie” gets used a lot. I found this one interesting enough, but overall I’m just not sure how I feel about it. Perhaps when I give it that second viewing sometime down the road…