The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh

• The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh was the first giallo pairing of director Sergio Martino, his brother/producer Luciano Martino, and star Edwige Fenech — a partnership that ran through three more films over the next two years and helped crown Fenech the genre's 'Queen of Giallo.'
• English-language distributors released the film under several different titles, including 'Next!,' 'The Next Victim!,' and 'Blade of the Ripper,' with different regional cuts running different lengths.
• Shooting ran 36 days starting August 24, 1970, split between Austria, Spain, and Italy — not the tighter 18-day, Vienna-and-Rome-only shoot sometimes claimed.
• A sex scene between Fenech and co-star George Hilton was trimmed for the film's original Italian release (later restored on home video), and the UK denied the film a certificate outright.
• The score is by Nora Orlandi — a rare woman composer in the giallo scene at the time — built around a Dies Irae variation. It is NOT a Bruno Nicolai score, despite Nicolai scoring several of Martino's later Fenech gialli.
• The film's success in Italy launched Martino's giallo run in earnest: three more entries followed within two years, including All the Colors of the Dark (1972), again starring Fenech.

Julie's flashbacks to Jean's razor games are cut to bleed into the present-day murders, keeping the audience unsure for most of the runtime whether the killings are real or filtered through Julie's trauma. That uncertainty is the point: Martino spends the whole film making Julie look unreliable, only to reveal in the final stretch that she was the one running the con on everyone else.

The Wardh surname may be a dark pun on the German 'Wart' — to wait, or to guard — casting Julie as a woman stationed at the threshold between complicity and victimhood. Every man in her orbit positions himself as her protector, yet Neil and George are ultimately revealed to be plotting against her for her money.

Carol's murder happens entirely off-page for Julie — she learns about it after the fact rather than witnessing it, the same way the audience is kept a step behind the killer's identity for most of the film. Martino flips that withheld-information dynamic completely in the finale, when it turns out Julie was the one staging her own disappearance all along, and it's Neil and George who end up blindsided.

Julie Wardh's secret isn't a lover — it's a taste for pain. Her old S&M affair with sadistic ex Jean left her with a blood fetish she's spent her marriage burying, and when a straight-razor killer starts carving up women in Vienna, Jean's sudden reappearance puts him at the top of every suspect list. Her diplomat husband Neil is barely home. Her friend Carol's cousin George offers an affair instead, and Julie takes it. Then Carol turns up dead. Then Julie herself is nearly gassed to death in a scene staged to look like suicide — orchestrated by a Jean who faked his own death, and paid off by George, who shoots him rather than split the money. The last stretch peels back the real con: Neil and George have been running the whole thing together, banking on Julie's insurance payout and Carol's inheritance. Except Julie isn't dead. She's the one who set the trap, and it's the men who end up wrecked on the side of the highway.