Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #41220 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-10-01
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Italian
• Subtitled in: English
• Running time: 92 minutes

From Amazon.com
Long before reality shows took over the TV airwaves and violent parodies like Series 7 and Battle Royale hit international screens, Elio Petri made this campy social satire of a future in which the bored, the ambitious, and the just plain violent can sign up for a deadly game of cat and mouse. "The Big Hunt is necessary as a social safety valve," explains one TV personality. "Why control births when we can control deaths?" Marcello Mastroianni, who plays the womanizing Italian media darling with a gift for ingenious assassinations, becomes the target of sexy champion Ursula Andress, a New York Amazon with a wardrobe as deadly as it is chic. She'll pocket $1 million if she can successfully kill Mastroianni, her 10th and last victim, but on the side she concocts a deal to do the deed in concert with a live song-and-dance extravaganza mounted by a tea company.

Directed with tongue firmly in cheek, Petri lampoons the whole media obsession with high-risk contests and games of chance with cool style, absurdly chic fashions, a bouncy score of organ riffs and funky lounge sounds, and a comically blasé performance by Mastroianni. It's like Fellini gone ballistic with a hint of Divorce, Italian Style: a battle of the sexes in a world where spontaneous shootouts are forever erupting in the fringes of the frame. --Sean Axmaker

Review
Elio Petri's La Decima Vittima (aka The 10th Victim) is an unlikely combination of satire, science fiction, cat-and-mouse thriller and dark-humored romantic comedy, and it manages to work quite well on all these levels thanks to Petri's light but pointed touch and a pair of engaging performances by Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress. Set in that Not Too Distant Future that was so common in 1960s sci-fi, Petri gives this story of a game of death (a notion that had been familiar since The Most Dangerous Game in 1932) a fresh touch with a striking visual style (thanks to Piero Poletto's production design, Gianni Di Venanzo's camerawork and Giulio Coltellacci's costumes) that manages to be sleek, colorful and just a bit ridiculous all at once, and the narrative style follows the images as the two handsome killers are surrounded by bumbling television producers intent on shoehorning a sponsor's message into the show at every opportunity. Mastroianni and Andress also have the intelligence to underplay the film's humor (Mastroianni just about defines laconic in his performance), and they have a powerful onscreen chemistry that makes their attraction to one another seem plausible despite the incredibly unlikely circumstances. (It certainly doesn't hurt that Andress is appallingly beautiful in this role -- who wouldn't be smitten with her?) And while suspense takes a back seat to satire and curious romantic byplay in The 10th Victim, Petri juggles the various elements with enough dexterity that the false endings seem genuine (at least for a moment) and the ending is a genuine surprise. The 10th Victim may well have been the smartest and most original offshoot of the European spy boom of the 1960s (most of the plot elements are there, even if the spies are not), and it's still sharp, sexy and engaging entertainment more than forty years after it was released; the rise of reality television has made it all the more timely, though thankfully no one has yet tried to bring "The Big Hunt" to the small screen. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

On the DVD
Widescreen presentation [1.74:1] enhanced for 16x9 TVs
Languages: Italian; English
Optional English subtitles
Theatrical trailer
Talent bios

Customer Reviews

Ballistic Bossoms
The Italians really did 1960's camp the best. I mean, what is campier than Ursula Andress chasing a man around in a lavender, backless pant suit, while brandishing a pistol? A killer bikini top? A rest, relax and sex stop on the side of the highway? A cult of sunset worshipers in caftans on the beach? The cinematography and locations are so stylish. Rooftop jazz bars in the blaring sun, minimalist interiors decorated with giant, blinking eyeballs, New York's financial district, pre-World Trade Center and Rome and the Vatican shot from a helicopter. Death and fear, what could be funnier?

10th Victim
This movie is what I call one of my "guilty pleasures" and when I discovered it had come out on DVD I had to get it. I first saw this in 1966 and although time has marched on it still is a joy to watch. Sometimes it's not because a DVD has 5 stars and excellent audio/video but because it's a personal favorite. If you agree go ahead,indulge yourself-oh,yea, try watching with the english subtitles on for subtle differences. Now let's see if the powers-that-be can manage the release of "Blow-Up"

THE 10th VICTIM
An early forerunner in the futuristic "legalized-killing-as-TV-entertainment" genre, The 10th Victim lays the groundwork for many subsequent films including Roller Ball, The Running Man, and most recently Daniel Minahan's Series 7: The Contenders. Briefly summarized: in the 21st Century Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress are two all-star assassins pitted against each other in "The Big Hunt," an international game of legalized murder in which a score of 10-kills awards the victor a prize of one million dollars. What sets this film apart from the others is not so much the plot (as while it may be the original in concept, its followers certainly succeed better in overall craft and more pointed satire) as the permanent aesthetic time/date-stamp of 1960's camp. The 10th Victim is a 60's version of the future, in the very best sense. It's a future full of awesome color schemes, ultra-cool music, great furniture, swanky pads, and characters that just ooze with sexual energy. The gem of this film is an opening sequence in which Andress dances around her ninth victim in a hipster club, fashionably slapping the men in the audience with cool and choreographed abandon before mowing down her adversary with bullets fired from a gun hidden in her bra (a gimmick later ripped for the Fembots in Austin Powers). And while the film offers a couple of other moments that approach the brilliance of this opening, its full potential is never realized -- things are not pushed nearly far enough. My biggest complaint: the alligator death chair catapult gizmo is never put to full effect, though perhaps I'm just yearning for the very thing this film means to comment on - more bloody spectacle. All in all it's definitely worth seeing, though you might supplement it with a healthy dose of Mario Bava's Danger Diabolik for good measure.